Stanley W. Dubinsky, Ph.D. - US grants

98-17364
Dubinsky & Davies
ABSTRACT

A workshop titled "The Role of Grammatical Functions in Transformational Syntax" will be held during the 1999 Linguistic Institute at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. The workshop will explore the place of grammatical functions (GFs) in transformational theories of syntax, which since Noam Chomsky's 1965 book Aspects of the Theory of Syntax have held that GFs such as subject and object are not primitives of the theory, but are defined in terms of the hierarchical configurations of phrase structure representations. Recent instantiations of these theories, such as Principles and Parameters and the Minimalist Program, have undergone revisions which incorporate principles utilizing GFs in a way that appears to admit their roles as primitives. These innovations raise the fundamental question of whether or not GFs can indeed be configurational, i.e. defined on phrase structure representations.

The workshop will bring together the work of leading researchers relating to these issues, including:
* - the ways in which GFs have been incorporated into current transformational theories;
* - whether unitary configurationally defined GFs can be identified in current transformational syntax;
* - if configurational definitions of GFs have been reduced to axioms of the theory, the degree to which these structural representations of GFs yield significant insights;
* - the inventory of GFs that must be recognized in the theory;
* - and whether all languages instantiate all projections involved in defining GFs.

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Stanley Dubinsky and Dr. William Davies will organize a scholarly panel in connection with the Linguistic Society of America's annual meeting in January, 2005, and a two-day workshop to be held at the LSA Summer Institute in July, 2005. The topic of these meetings is the analysis of two grammatical constructions, called Raising and Control, which have been central to the development of linguistic theory over the past 40 years. The January 2005 panel will gather leading researchers in order to articulate a common set of research questions to be addressed in the July 2005 workshop. Workshop participants will be asked to focus on new empirical data, especially from understudied languages. Workshop participants will be sought from both theoretical linguists and linguists whose research interests lie in the interdisciplinary areas of language acquisition, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and language variation, and neurolinguistics. In order to make the proceedings of the panel widely available, a digital recording of the January panel will be made accessible on the project's website, along with a textual transcript. The website will also provide access to the workshop program and abstracts, and will provide the opportunity for participants to make drafts of their research available to the public. Selected papers from the panel and workshop will be published as a book.

With NSF support and under the direction of Stanley Dubinsky and Hyeson Park. Ms. Mila Tasseva-Kurktchieva will investigate the second language (L2) acquisition of the Bulgarian noun phrase by adult native speakers of English. The goals of this research are: (i) to test a new variant of the dynamic approach to the L2 acquisition of Bulgarian nominal structure, including the timing and order of acquisition of gender and number agreement, possessives, and definite determiners. The study will use a unique pool of subjects-US Peace Corps volunteers exposed to the target language through both immersion and classroom instruction. This research will be among a few studies to focus on the very early stages of L2 acquisition-three to four weeks after subjects' first exposure to the target language. Subjects will be tested before and after exposure to (somewhat) formal grammar instruction in the classroom. Thus, the study will utilize both naturally occurring data and data from a controlled classroom environment

This study promises several important results: (i) it adds to our knowledge of the cognitive processes involved in the L2 acquisition of the grammatical structure; (ii) it will contribute to our understanding of the acquisition and syntactic structure of Slavic languages; (iii) where most L2 acquisition studies are concerned with the grammatical properties gender and number, definiteness, or possessives in isolation, this research will consider the acquisition of these properties in relations to one another; and (iv) it will inform foreign language teaching practices and help to answer long-standing questions regarding the role of input type (instructed versus natural) in L2 acquisition.

It goes without saying that the Middle East conflict system is one of the world's most important and intractable problem areas, with consequences that ripple across the global system. At a time when academics in political science have been advocating multi-method research approaches that are strongly rooted in theory, this workshop brings together a variety of political science and social science approaches to social conflict and political conflict to examine the ongoing conflict system of the Middle East.

The workshop melds together academic approaches, methods and findings with policy oriented needs. It brings together conflict scholars, primarily from political science, applying a range of advanced, rigorous analytic and data gathering techniques, to address the single empirical domain of the contemporary Middle East conflict system. This multidisciplinary workshop demonstrates the complementarity between formal approaches and various empirical mtehods, and also notes the relevance of scholarly research to policy questions.

With regards to broader impacts, the results of the workshop will be of interest to policy makers dealing with conflict situations. In addition, a number of graduate students are invited to the workshop. They will have an opportunity to interact with the other participants as well as observe the development and use of multidisciplinary and multi-method approaches. It is hoped that these experiences will influence their later work.

The cognitively based theories that influence current psycholinguistic research are based largely on non-neural data and theoretical constructs. The foundations of these theories are formal linguistic models of grammar as well as cognitive models of memory, attention, and learning. However, given that language processing must take place in a physical structure, it is critical to develop theories that are biologically plausible and compatible with other theories in the cognitive neurosciences. The 26th Annual CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference, to be held in March 2013 at the University of South Carolina, will include a Special Session to address this question: Can the basic architecture of language developed in the 1950s and 1960s that was based primarily on linguistic evidence, or in the 1980s and 1990s based on statistical constraint-based models, survive in the era of brain imaging, brain stimulation, and sophisticated cognitive neuropsychology? If not, what new architectures for the language system are compatible with what has been learned from the entire range of relevant evidence--including linguistic, behavioral, and biological data?

The Special Session will bring together six prominent researchers to consider this fundamental issue. This particular group was chosen because a range of major cognitive neuroscience methodologies besides traditional neuropsychology is represented, and because the speakers take diverse theoretical perspectives on linguistic architectures and processing.

The Special Session will make contact with the widest possible spectrum of conference attendees, but particularly with younger scientists with interests in neurobiological approaches to cognition and language. The Special Session will also help to ensure that the resource-intensive research undertaken by neuroscientists studying language will have as broad an impact as possible and will begin to seriously inform fundamental theorizing in all areas of psycholinguistics.