Complexity in Language Sciences

Date: 12-Dec-2024 - 13-Dec-2024
Location: Paris (Maison de la Recherche, 4 rue des Irlandais, 75005 Paris), France
Contact: Georgeta Cislaru
Contact Email: [email protected]

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics

Meeting Description:

While speaking, writing, listening and reading are easy, simple, natural activities for those who practice them on a daily basis, what can be said about the cognitive and linguistic processes that underlie them? What about the languages in which these activities are practiced, and the theories and models developed to explain and represent the mechanisms involved? And finally, what can be said about individuals (speakers, listeners, writers, readers) who have not yet finished the learning process of these activities (children in the language acquisition phase, adults learning a second language), especially given that certain processes that may prove particularly difficult or even impossible (e.g.: writing in deaf people)?

The question of complexity quickly arises, and the notion is regularly invoked in the language sciences, though often in a vague and intuition-driven way. In practice, this question of complexity takes on different forms depending on who is formulating it (psycholinguists, linguists, descriptive or model scientists, etc.) and who is targeted by it (speakers, listeners, natives, non-natives, learner s, atypical subjects, etc.). In short, how complex, for whom and why? Is it necessary or contingent complexity? To answer these questions, we need to know what kind of complexity we're talking about: conceptual (e.g. representation of time and reference in languages), formal (e.g. phonological, graphic, morphological and syntactic structure of a language) or physiological (unnatural articulatory gestures, material constraints)? Does one complexity call for another (e.g. does the complex conception of time in a language call for a complex syntax, does formal complexity imply cognitive complexity and vice versa?).

The aim of this conference is to discuss the current state of the art on complexity in the language sciences. It will offer the opportunity to examine the history and use of the notion of complexity in linguistics, through a variety of theoretical and epistemological perspectives. Its ambition is to bring together oral and written linguists, NLP/computer scientists and psycholinguists, etc., to discuss the complexity that runs, to varying degrees, through the different components of language and discourse (segmental, suprasegmental, morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic). The expected result is to craft a concept that will work for the community, however stratified it may be, since the criteria on which it is based are obviously many:
• For the linguist, complexity is that which is not simple to represent and model, because (i) it is not easily predictable (e.g. unexpected constructions, productions that escape general rules), (ii) it could be of a continuous nature, and therefore difficult to isolate or categorize (e.g. the prosodic level of representation as opposed to the segmental level; opaque or indefinite reference)[1]. A complex element is also an observable that can be described but which resists explanation (e.g. errors in deaf writing).
• For the human subject, everything that is unnatural and therefore difficult to produce or to hear (such as a foreign language) would be complex. Complexity would also refer to units which are linguistically underspecified, and thus ambiguous or implicit, entailing a high cognitive load.

December 12th

9h-9h30 : Opening session - « Complexity » as seen by the organizers
9h30-10h30 : Invited talk- Didier Grandjean (Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, U. of Geneva, Switzerland), La complexité au cœur de l’émotion

10h30-10h50 : Coffee break

Session 1
10h50-11h20 : Pascale Feldkamp Moreira and Yuri Bizzoni (Aarhus U., Denmark), Levels of Complexity in Literary Language: A Preliminary Study
11h20-11h50 : Quentin Feltgen (Ghent U., Belgium), Language as a complex system from a structural and diachronic perspective
11h50-12h20 : Evie A. Malaia (U. of Alabama, United States), Linguistic Communication as Information Compression and Extraction: Towards a Unified Framework for Framing Language Complexity

12h20-14h : Lunch

14h-15h : Invited talk - Sylvain Kahane (MoDyco, U. of Paris Nanterre, France), Longueurs des dépendances ou flux de dépendances : deux mesures de complexité syntaxique et deux façons de voir les contraintes sur la mémoire à court terme

15h-15h20 : Coffee break

Session 2
15h20-15h50 : Charles Redmon (U. of Essex), Meghavarshini Krishnaswamy (U. of Arizona, United States) and Indranil Dutta (Jadavpur U., India), Context-dependency in measures of articulatory complexity
15h50-16h20 : Núria Gala, Francesca Di Garbo and Pascale Colé (U. of Aix Marseille, France), Vers une mesure de la complexité des mots dérivés : que mesure-t-on et dans quel but ?

Session 3
16h20-16h50 : Daniel Walter (Emory U., Oxford College, United States), Understanding morphosyntactic complexity through a functionalist, psycholinguistic perspective: The resilience of noun-phrase agreement structures in standard German
16h50-17h20 : Nico Lehmann (U. of Humboldt, Berlin, Germany), Clausal complexity across registers in German and Persian

December 13th

9h-10h : Invited talk - Thomas François (UCLouvain, Belgique), Evaluer automatiquement la complexité textuelle : quels défis reste-t-il après 101 ans de recherches en lisibilité ?

10h-10h20 : Coffee break

Session 4
10h20-10h50 : Trung Hieu Ngo (U. of Nantes, France), Nicolas Béchet (South Brittany U., France) and Delphine Battistelli (U. of Paris Nanterre, France), Complexity as a regression task
10h50-11h20 : Oksana Ivchenko, Natalia Grabar (U. of Lille, France), Detection of Complexity in General and Medical-language Texts Using Eye-Tracking Data

Session 5
11h20-11h50 : Adrien Dadone (U. of Vincennes-Saint Denis, France), Les sourds signeurs à l’épreuve de la complexité syntaxique de l’écrit : le cas de la subordonnée relative
11h50-12h20 : Mireille Esther Gettler Summa, Raphaël Prénovec, Chunxiao Yan, Caroline Bogliotti and Anne Lacheret Dujour (U. of Paris Nanterre, France), Eléments de Complexité Syntaxique dans des Ecrits de Scripteurs Sourds en Langue Française

12h20-14h : Lunch

14h-15h : Invited talk - Alice Blumenthal-Dramé (U. of Freiburg, Germany), Complexity measures and online language processing: Does one size fit all languages?

15h-15h20 : Coffee break

Session 6
15h20-15h50 : Tess Wensink, Karen Lahousse (KU Leuven, Belgium), Cécile De Cat (U. of Leeds, Great Britain), Katerina Palasis (U. of French Riviera) and Béatrice Busson (KU Leuven, Belgium), Disentangling Structural and Developmental Complexity in the Acquisition of C’est-clefts in L1 French
15h50-16h20 : Nathalie Gettliffe (U. of Strasbourg, France), Définir et mesurer la complexité en acquisition du Français Langue Étrangère et Seconde
16h20-16h50 : Christophe Parisse (U. of Paris Nanterre, France), Loïc Liégeois (Paris Cité U., France), Christophe Benzitoun (U. of Lorraine, France), Caroline Masson (Sorbonne nouvelle U.) and Christine da Silva-Genest (U. of Paris Nanterre, France), Comment évaluer la complexité syntaxique des productions orales enfantines ?

17h-18h – Round table