Linguistic variety: why psychologists should care
Professor Greville G Corbett
- When?
- Tuesday 9 October 2012, 16.00 to 17.00
- Where?
- 01AC02
- Open to:
- Public, Staff, Students
- Speaker:
- Professor Greville G Corbett
Psychologists have invested a good deal of time into research on language. For understandable reasons, this research focuses on one corner of the phenomenon. But language is more varied and interesting than some psychologists (and many linguists) realize. I look at linguistic diversity, and its impending loss, first through the numbers, and then illustrate it by specific features (means of categorization). As a lead in, I give a brief account of Groucho Marx and word hood. This leads naturally to counting lions in Bayso, and the gender of grasshoppers in Bininj Gun Wok. From there we can consider the vast paradigms of Archi and the complexity of paradigms in languages of the Oto Manguean family. The aims are to give an idea of the projects going on in the Surrey Morphology Group, and to alert you to some of the challenges and pitfalls of language.
Professor Greville G Corbett
Surrey Morphology Group, University of Surrey
Greville G. Corbett is Distinguished Professor of Linguistics, University of Surrey, and leads the Surrey Morphology Group. He works on the typology of features, as in Gender (1991), Number (2000) and Agreement (2006), all with Cambridge UP. Recently he has been developing the canonical approach to typology. He is one of the originators of Network Morphology; see The Syntax-Morphology Interface: A Study of Syncretism (with Matthew Baerman and Dunstan Brown, CUP 2005). He collaborated with Marina Chumakina, Dunstan Brown and Harley Quilliam on the Archi Dictionary. He holds a European Research Council Advanced Grant for research on morphological complexity.
