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SUMMARY:Heritage grammars and linguistic complexity: A view from grammatic
 al gender - Professor Terje Lohndal (NTNU Norwegian University of Science 
 and Technology)
DTSTART:20210128T163000Z
DTEND:20210128T180000Z
UID:TALK156457@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Tim Laméris
DESCRIPTION:"Register here":https://forms.gle/hhmex2pjepqHeZpr6\n\n*Abstra
 ct* \n\nMorphosyntax is one of the areas in heritage grammars that is ofte
 n subject to change compared with a given baseline (e.g.\, Montrul 2016\, 
 Polinsky 2018). The dynamic nature of this area makes is a fertile domain 
 for investigating how mental grammars change across the lifespan of an ind
 ividual speaker and across generations of speakers. In this talk\, we will
  specifically focus on grammatical gender and use this as a case study of 
 how to model complexity in heritage speakers and beyond. Establishing a wo
 rking definition of the dynamic complexity of linguistic structure and the
  accompanying operations responsible for generating these structures is a 
 major challenge for formal approaches to language. This challenge is even 
 more daunting when modeling the grammars of multilingual speakers\, due to
  the dynamic and integrated nature of these grammars (Putnam et al.\, 2018
 ).\n\nAdopting Miestamo's (2006\, 2008) systemic definition of complexity\
 , we provide an overview of how the connection between atomic linguistic e
 lements can be neatly captured in an exoskeletal model of grammar. An exos
 keletal model calls for a separation of the mechanisms responsible for gen
 erating syntactic structure and the insertion of lexical items (i.e.\, mor
 photactic units) into said structures. Notably\, this formalism allows us 
 to propose a new typology of possible outcomes in heritage grammars\, a ty
 pology which distinguishes between features and the functional sequence it
 self\, and whether or not these are retained or lost. To make this argumen
 t\, we will present a case study of grammatical gender assignment in langu
 age mixing environments.
LOCATION:Online
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