“Adult language acquisition and syntactic change”
Guest lecture by Professor George Walkden from University of Konstanz
Info about event
Time
Location
Building 1481, room 424
Organizer
Anne Mette Nyvad and her Sapere Aude-project "At the Edge of Language"
This talk will assess the place of adult language acquisition as an explanatory factor in syntactic change, making the case that certain changes can only be understood fully from this perspective. I will present a theory of syntactic “L2-difficulty” in terms of feature interpretability, and some preliminary results from the STARFISH project that bear on it, dealing with negation in the history of Low German and null subjects in the history of Latin American Spanish.
Everyone is welcome.