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 Print

Titre On the Complexity and Limits of Languages: Saussure\'s Silences, Chomsky\'s Erasures
Conférencier John Joseph (University of Edinburgh)
Date mardi 26 février 2013
Heure 12h15
Salle L208 (Bâtiment Candolle)
Description

In this centenary of Saussure's death it is hard to resist examining
present-day issues in the light of his legacy to modern linguistics.
At this summer's ICL, F. J. Newmeyer will be reconsidering the
Saussure-Chomsky link, which I too have worked on (Joseph 1990, 2002)
and will give a brief account of here. The main topic though will be
the (long taboo) question of the relative complexity of language
structure (on which see Joseph & Newmeyer 2012), which has come back
to the fore in the last few years with well-known accounts of Piranhã
(by Everett) and Riau Indonesian (by Gil). At issue is the fundamental
question motivating Chomsky's original research programme: what, if
any, are the limits on the structure of a possible human language?
Accounts of 20th-century linguistics portray this as a sharp break
with Saussurean structuralism, which recognizes no such limits. Yet
there is an inherent universalism in Saussure's own model of language
that is arguably what Chomsky has steadily been regressing toward.
   
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