ComSyn lecture: George Walkden

Speaker: George Walkden (University of Konstanz)
Title: Adult language acquisition and syntactic change
Date: Thu 2 May
Location: Lipsius 1.33
Zoom: Meeting ID: 617 3017 2255 – Passcode: 1qx8Vm4? (link)
Time: 16:15 – 17:30

Abstract

This talk will assess the place of adult language acquisition as an explanatory factor in syntactic change, making the case that certain changes can only be understood fully from this perspective. I will present a theory of syntactic “L2-difficulty” in terms of feature interpretability, and some preliminary results from the STARFISH project that bear on it, dealing with negation in the history of Low German and null subjects in the history of Latin American Spanish.