Linguistics Colloquium

The Department of Linguistics Winter 2019 Colloquium Series continues February 15 with a presentation by U-M's Natasha Abner, Assistant Professor of Linguistics. All are welcome. Light refreshments will be served.

ABSTRACT

Handmade Events

Events in the world unfold in different ways and the way we use language to talk about the world reflects these differences. However, a central tenet of contemporary linguistics is that language is not an “anything goes” kind of system. In this talk, I’ll present a series of studies that explore communicative (and, to a lesser extent, cognitive) biases in how we talk about events, focusing on what happens when how we talk about events is with our hands. These studies examine (a) abstract linguistic structures that underlie both sign and speech, (b) modality effects that shape how these structures are manifested in signed versus spoken languages, and (c) patterns in gesture that suggest certain phenomena may be driven by broader communicative biases and not restricted to language.