Rappel: [sfl-cause] expos=?iso-8859-1?Q?=E9_?=Strickland 25/2

[Bridget Copley]

Le projet "La causalité dans le langage et la cognition"  de la Fédération "Typologie et universaux linguistiques" (CNRS FR 2559) a le plaisir d'annoncer un exposé : 


Semantics may reflect "core" event structure: Language as a window into event psychology.
Brent Strickland, Yale University

Lundi 25 fév 14:30-16:30, CNRS site Pouchet (59 rue Pouchet, Paris 75017), salle 159
métro ligne 13 Guy Môquet ou Brochant, RER C Porte de Clichy (sortie La Jonquière), bus 66

Résumé : Although semanticists and psychologists have long standing interests in the nature of event representation, interactions between these communities have unfortunately remained limited. Part of the reason is methodological. Psychologists have traditionally studied non-linguistically represented events and their influence on mental processes like attention, memory and internal time keeping. Semanticists on the other hand have (obviously) been interested in event representation in linguistic contexts. Despite these diverging methodologies, I argue that lessons from semantics may have important implications for psychological theories of event representation. In particular, psychology currently lacks a clear description of the computational nature of event representations (e.g. do they have internal structure or are they atomistic?), and this is exactly the type of question that work from linguistics could shed light on. In recommending a theoretical perspective capable of importing findings from one field into the other, I suggest that language may have co-opted core knowledge of events (that is operative in beings lacking language like infants and primates) as a way of structuring the syntax/semantics interface. Thus by examining universal phenomena typically studied by linguists like thematic role assignment and telicity, psychologists can glean useful hypotheses about “core” knowledge and the structure of non-linguistically represented events. I review some related psychological studies suggesting that this perspective has already proven useful, but will also propose new lines of concrete empirical work that should be of interest to both linguists and psychologists.

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