Edward Stabler, UCLA - Talk on Thursday, 8 Feb.

[Margery Ishmael]

Thursday, 8 February at 3:30 pm in Ryerson 251

DEFINING, RECOGNIZING AND LEARNING MINIMALIST LANGUAGES

                  by Edward Stabler, UCLA

Many different kinds of grammars have been developed for human
languages. Until rather recently, the best developed grammars,
grammars in the mainstream linguistic traditions, have all been so
complex that recognition of definable languages is intractable or
undecidable, and learnability remains mysterious. But there is
recently a remarkable convergence of independent linguistic traditions
on "mildly context sensitive" languages with nice properties. This
talk will show first, how a range of recent proposals in the
mainstream tradition of "transformational syntax" are part of this
convergence so that efficient recognition is guaranteed, and second,
how this work bears on models of human language learning.

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The talk will be followed by refreshments in Ryerson 255
If you would like to meet with the speaker, please send e-mail to 
marge at cs.uchicago.edu