LINGUIST List 21.2365 Thu May 27 2010 Calls: Comp Ling, Psycholing/USA Editor for this issue: Di Wdzenczny <dilinguistlist.org> LINGUIST is pleased to announce the launch of an exciting new feature: Easy Abstracts! Easy Abs is a free abstract submission and review facility designed to help conference organizers and reviewers accept and process abstracts online. Just go to: http://www.linguistlist.org/confcustom, and begin your conference customization process today! With Easy Abstracts, submission and review will be as easy as 1-2-3! Directory         1.    Neal Snider, Empirical Evaluation of Usage-Based Constructionist Models Message 1: Empirical Evaluation of Usage-Based Constructionist Models Date: 26-May-2010 From: Neal Snider <nsniderbcs.rochester.edu> Subject: Empirical Evaluation of Usage-Based Constructionist Models E-mail this message to a friend Full Title: Empirical Evaluation of Usage-Based Constructionist Models Date: 06-Jan-2011 - 09-Jan-2011 Location: Pittsburgh, PA, USA Contact Person: Neal Snider Meeting Email: nsniderbcs.rochester.edu Web Site: http://www.hlp.rochester.edu/lsa2011 Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Psycholinguistics Call Deadline: 16-Jul-2010 Meeting Description: 2011 LSA Annual Meeting Organized Session: Empirical evaluations of usage-based constructionist models of language representation and processing. Call for Papers Organizers: Neal Snider, University of Rochester Daniel Wiechmann, Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena Elma Kerz, RWTH-Universitat Aachen T. Florian Jaeger, University of Rochester Contact: nsniderbcs.rochester.edu URL: http://www.hlp.rochester.edu/lsa2011 The website will be updated as deadlines approach. Deadlines: Intention to submit: June 11 250-word abstracts: July 16 Extended abstracts for the workshop website: Dec 17 Send all abtracts and correspondence to the email above. We are eliciting submissions for 10-minute talks that present novel empirical results and/or talks that propose methodological pathways that could be explored to amass empirical evidence on the matter. In addition, there will also be two longer 20-min slots that summarize existing data and argue for a specific theoretical interpretation (as opposed to others), so we also invite submissions for this format. Final acceptance of the workshop proposal is pending. Abstract: Recent years have seen a growing interest in usage-based (UB) theories of language, which assume that language use plays a causal role in the development of linguistic systems over historical time. A central assumption of the UB-framework is the idea that shapes of grammars are closely connected to principles of human cognitive processing (Bybee 2006, Hawkins 2004). UB-accounts strongly gravitate towards sign- or construction-based theories of language, viz. theories that are committed to the belief that linguistic knowledge is best conceived of as an assembly of symbolic structures (e.g. Goldberg 2006, Langacker 2008, Sag et al. 2003). These constructionist accounts share (1) the postulation of a single representational format of all linguistic knowledge and (2) a strong commitment to psychological plausibility of mechanisms for the the learning, storage, and retrieval of linguistic units. They do, however, exhibit a considerable degree of variation with respect to their architectural and mechanistic details (cf. Croft & Cruse 2004). This workshop will bring together linguists, psycholinguists, and computational linguists that commit to a constructionist UB framework to discuss which methodologies can best shed light on questions pertaining to the representational nature of constructions and the mechanisms involved in their on-line processing. A key issue in this regard is the balancing of storage parsimony and processing parsimony: Maximizing storage parsimony implies greater computational demand and vice versa. The space of logical possibilities ranges from a complete inheritance model (minimal storage redundancy) to a full-entry model (maximal storage redundancy). Currently, the empirical validation of the theoretical situation is not yet conclusive: the representations involved in language processing involve extremely fine- grained lexical-structural co-occurrences, for example frequent four-word phrases are processed faster than infrequent ones by both children (Bannard and Matthews 2008) and adults (Arnon and Snider 2010). On the other hand, syntactic exemplar models (Bod 2006) overfit and undergeneralize compared to models that do not store all structures in the training data (cf. Post and Gildea 2009, although they found that Tree Substitution Grammar representations induced in a Bayesian framework still split the parsimony continuum towards greater redundancy). Also, experimental work has argued that models of categorization that directly map phonetic dimensions to phonological categories (and therefore more directly reflect the statistics of the training data) do not predict human behavior as well as models that assume independent, intermediate representations (Toscano and McMurray 2010). The workshop seeks to address these and related issues and asks which empirical methodologies could guide the further theoretical development, and intends to provide a forum for discussion for empirical and theoretical linguists embracing a usage-based constructionist approach to the study of language. Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue Page Updated: 27-May-2010       About LINGUIST    |   Contact Us       While the LINGUIST List makes every effort to ensure the linguistic relevance of sites listed on its pages, it cannot vouch for their contents.