Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique
Ce séminaire reçoit des conférenciers invités spécialisés dans différents domaines de la linguistique. Les membres du Département, les étudiants et les personnes externes intéressées sont tous cordialement invités. Description du séminaire 
| Titre | What conversational English tells us about the nature of grammar |
| Conférencier | Frederick Newmeyer (UBC/U.Washington, Simon Fraser U.) |
| Date | mardi 16 avril 2013 |
| Heure | 12h15 |
| Salle | L208 (Bâtiment Candolle) |
| Description | Many functional and cognitive linguists believe that the complex abstract structures posited by generative grammarians are an artifact of ‘disembodied sentences that analysts have made up ad hoc, … rather than utterances produced by real people in real discourse situations’ (Michael Tomasello). Their view is that if one focuses on ‘naturally occurring discourse’, then grammar will reveal itself to be primarily a matter of memorized formulas and simple constructions. This talk challenges that view. Basing its claims on a 170MB corpus of conversational English, it argues that the nature of real discourse reinforces the need for a sophisticated engine for representing grammatical knowledge. |
| Document(s) joint(s) |
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