Lecture | LUCL Colloquium - Spring 2015
LUCL Colloquium: How We Learn What Not To Say
- Adele Goldberg (Princeton University)
- Date
- Friday 27 February 2015
- Time
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 028
Title
Explain Me Something: How We Learn What Not To Say
Abstract
Although many constraints are motivated by general semantic or syntactic facts, in certain cases, formulations are semantically sensible and syntactically well-formed, and yet noticeably dispreferred (e.g., ??She explained me something; ??the afraid boy). I will argue that competition in context--statistical preemption--plays a key role in learning what not to say in these cases. I will also suggest a domain-general mechanism that may underlie this process, and offer a speculative proposal as to why L2 learners may have more trouble avoiding these dispreferred utterances.