Årsmøde og foredrag

Ilja Serzant er professor i slavistik ved universitetet i Potsdam. Titlen på hans foredrag er Efficiency effects in two grammatical domains.

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Før årsmødet fremsendes dagsorden, regnskab og Iljas foromtale. Mellem årsmødet og foredraget vil der være sandwich og drikkevarer. Tilmelding vil derfor være nødvendig.

Foromtale af Ilja Serzants foredrag Efficiency effects in two grammatical domains

Language provides a means for social communication. It is crucial that communication be not only successful but also efficient, that is, with minimal effort for both the speaker and the hearer and obeying high transmission accuracy. Efficiency is central to understanding universal communicative and cognitive underpinnings of language. Its effects are pervasive in language. In the long run, linguistic phenomena survive through the evolution of languages only if they are efficient in production, comprehension, and learning.

This, in turn, means that cross-linguistically and diachronically stable patterns must be highly efficient for human communication and, therefore, contain footprints of various efficiency pressures and their trade-offs. As such, they are amenable to uncovering particular efficiency pressures at work, their constraints, and interactional regularities – jointly referred to as efficiency structure here. For example, the coding lengths of grammatical and lexical items have been shown to depend on efficiency in various previous works since Greenberg.

In this talk, my aim will be to approach different guises of efficiency (henceforth efficiency structure). I will first discuss the distinction between online and offline effects. Then, I will turn to potential efficiency effects in (a) the domain of Differential Object Marking and (b) in the domain of verbal Person-Number indexes. I will exemplify efficiency effects here with some preliminary results from typological comparison.