27.4645, Calls: Cog Sci, Comp Ling, Lang Acq, Morphology, Psycholing/Switzerland

Mon Nov 14 20:32:47 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-4645. Mon Nov 14 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.4645, Calls: Cog Sci, Comp Ling, Lang Acq, Morphology, Psycholing/Switzerland

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Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2016 15:32:39
From: Itamar Kastner [itamar.kastner at hu-berlin.de]
Subject: What is in a Morpheme? Theory, Experiments, Computational Approaches to the Relation of Meaning and Form in Morphology

Full Title: What is in a Morpheme? Theory, Experiments, Computational Approaches to the Relation of Meaning and Form in Morphology 

Date: 10-Sep-2017 - 13-Sep-2017
Location: Zurich, Switzerland 
Contact Person: Stela Manova
Meeting Email: stela.manova at univie.ac.at

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Computational Linguistics; Language Acquisition; Morphology; Psycholinguistics 

Call Deadline: 18-Nov-2016 

Meeting Description:

What is in a morpheme? Theoretical, experimental and computational approaches
to the relation of meaning and form in morphology

The full text of the call is available at:
http://homepage.univie.ac.at/stela.manova/uploads/1/2/2/4/12243901/cfpsle2017w
orkshop.pdf 

There are enough examples in science that obvious things are the most
difficult to explain: issues such as how inorganic matter turns into organic
or how a child learns to understand language. There is a similar problem in
morphology. It is well known that morphemes consist of phonemes but only the
former can be associated with meaning (systematically) and it is a non-trivial
question how exactly this association happens.

There are three possible ways to approach the relation of meaning and form: 

A.  Form and meaning emerge simultaneously
B. The association is from meaning to form
C. The association is from form to meaning.  

The most important difference between these scenarios consists in the fact
that in scenarios B and C meaning may be assigned at the level of word, i.e.
one may claim that morphemes do not have meaning of their own or even that
there are no morphemes at all (in scenario B). (Information
(syntactic/morphological/morphosyntactic) that does not refer to
(phonological) form is called ‘meaning’ in this proposal.) 

Theoretical, experimental and computational linguistics approach word
structure from different perspectives and seem to diverge with respect to
which is the ''right'' scenario. Theoretical linguistics is interested in
generalizations over meaning (features) (scenarios A and B), both within
languages and typologically: e.g., only a language with plural can have dual
or no language makes more gender distinctions in the non-singular than in the
singular (Greenberg 1963). Experimental linguistics researches perception,
parsing, processing and production of word structure; computational
linguistics is focused on parsing and distribution of word structure.
Consequently, both experimental and computational linguistics follow scenario
C and their findings seem to contradict theoretical linguistics (see the full
CFP). Nevertheless, theoretical linguists (seem to) agree that speakers have
somewhat reliable intuitions about n-gram frequency over sub-word units. Thus,
the goals of this workshop are threefold: to encourage interdisciplinary
discussion, to clarify and unify assumptions, and to pave the way for
collaboration.

The three scenarios are exemplified in the full CFP.

As an alternative, non-linguistic source of inspiration, we would like to turn
your attention to the following video on how computers learn to understand
pictures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40riCqvRoMs (the speaker, Fei-Fei
Li, is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University).
Computer vision is one of the most important areas of research in machine
learning and many striking analogies with linguistic analyses can be made. 

Organizers:

Stela Manova (University of Vienna)
Harald Hammarström (Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History,
Jena)
Itamar Kastner (Humboldt University, Berlin)

2nd Call for Papers:

Note the deadline has been extended to 18 November.

The workshop is planned as part of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Societas
Linguistica Europea (SLE). We invite abstracts that are no longer than 300
words, excluding examples and references, which tackle any aspect of the
form-meaning issue in morphology. Papers that report recent psycho-, neuro-,
computational and theoretical linguistics research are particularly welcome.
Please submit a pdf of your abstract to stela.manova at univie.ac.at by November
18, 2016.

Important Dates:

18 November 2016: deadline for submission of 300-word abstracts to the
workshop organizers
24 November 2016: notification of acceptance by the workshop organizers
25 November 2016: submission of the workshop proposal to SLE
25 December 2016: notification of acceptance of workshop proposals by SLE
15 January 2017: deadline for submission of full abstracts to SLE for review
31 March 2017: notification of paper acceptance
10-13 September 2017: SLE conference in Zürich

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