I have found a link to a valuable new
dissertation by Cholthicha Sudmuk (Ph.D.,
University of Texas at Austin, 2005), researcher at the Royal Institute
of Thailand. Supervised by Steve Wechsler, the author
characterizes the range of serial verb constructions in Thai from both
syntactic and semantic persepctives, then constructing an LFG analysis
involving both functional and thematic control:
I have just returned from Bangkok, where the 1st World Congress on the Power
of Language (May 22-25, 2006) was held in honor of the birthday of
HRH Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, who is very interested in
linguistic matters. The conference brought together a group of
people who might never attend the same conferences but nevertheless
share a focus on language, from the academic to the political. It
was a fascinating experience. Cholthicha Sudmuk, of
the Royal Institute, was my superb guide throughout my first visit to
Thailand, where I also enjoyed the hospitality of Professor Udom in a
wonderful visit to two Buddhist
temples and an evening of classical Thai dance
performances. All of the organizers were extremely
gracious. One of the papers presented is by Cholthicha:
Another paper;
The recent line of work is building on the idea of "Spoken Syntax"...
and I'll have more on this soon. Meanwhile, I'm off to the DELS
(Directions in English Language Studies) Conference at
Manchester.
Something interesting afoot:
...we are
holding a three-day conference which is intended to focus on
current and, especially, future directions in English Language
research, both synchronic and diachronic.
In addition, because DELS uniquely brings together historical and
contemporary studies, it will be the occasion for the launch of an
international association for research in English Language/Linguistics.
Last year I was in
New Zealand
on a University of Canterbury Visiting Erskine Fellowship.
I was hosted by
Ida
Toivonen with
Ash Asudeh
(both now moving to Carleton University in Ottawa where they will work
in linguistics and cognitive science -- and what a dynamic duo they
are! -- have a look at their
Journal
of Linguistics review of two minimalist textbooks, "Symptomatic
Imperfections", currently available from the New Work link on Ash's
personal
webpage). In addition to guest-teaching syntax with Ida and
discussing morphology and cycling with my old varsity coeval
Andrew
Carstairs-McCarthy -- among other fun things --
I began a collaboration with
Jen Hay,
which has just resulted in a new paper:
It is not such a strange leap as
it may first appear, for me to have taken up a topic in exemplar-based
linguistic models. For one thing,
Rens Bod and
Ron Kaplan had
already shown how analogical
reasoning from stored syntactic exemplars would work for the
dependency-cum-constituency grammars that LFG
characterizes. In fact, Rens has a paper on this appearing in the
same journal volume:
And for another thing, I was already
impressed by the exemplar-based lexical models developed by
Harald
Baayen and his students, as well as by the related work of Janet
Pierrehumbert, such as
I was really intrigued by Jen's approach to morphology that I had
happened to read about in her
Language
paper:
Hay, Jennifer (2002) From Speech
Perception to Morphology: Affix-ordering Revisited. Language 78.3,
2002: 527-555.
For a former philosophy major like myself, whose first exposure to
morphology was in the MIT days of
The
Sound Pattern of English, this new take on level-ordered
morphology was a fascinating eye-opener. I knew that Jen
was a collaborator of
Harald
Baayen, who had become a collaborator of mine in our paper:
Joan Bresnan, Anna Cueni, Tatiana
Nikitina, and Harald Baayen. In press. "
Predicting
the Dative Alternation." To appear in Royal Netherlands
Academy of Science Workshop on Foundations of Interpretation
proceedings.
And while at Canterbury I read the
first draft of Jen's and Harald's synoptic paper on statistical
approaches to morphology--
Hay, J and Baayen, H. (2005).
Shifting paradigms: gradient structure
in morphology.
Trends
in Cognitive Sciences, 9(7): 342-348 (pdf)
In other words, I got involved in
exemplar-based models out of general intellectual curiosity in the
new paradigms that are rapidly blossoming in linguistics and
allied fields of cognitive science.
I will continue with these notes from time to time, but at the moment
I've run out of it.