Mike Putnam

Squishy grammars 

Mike Putnams foredrag handler om tosprogethed og grammatik. Det er velkendt at tosprogede kan producere sætninger med elementer fra begge de sprog de behersker, såkaldt ’code-mixing’ eller ’blending’, hvor begge sprogs grammatikker så at sige er aktiveret samtidig. Dette er en udfordring for sprogvidenskabens forklaringsmodeller for tosprogedes sproglig-kognitive processering, men en udfordring som Mike Putnam vil tage op i foredraget og foreslå en beskrivelsesramme for.

ABSTRACT:

Research in cognitive neuroscience and psycholinguistics abounds confirming the fact that bilinguals simultaneously active (aspects of) both source grammars in production and comprehension. Given that competition is the norm rather than the exception for bilinguals, our attempts to model and evaluate these linguistic representations should also reflect this reality. In this presentation, I provide a detailed overview of Gradient Symbolic Computation (GSC; Smolensky et al., 2014) and its implementation in bilingual grammar outputs (Goldrick et al., 2016; Putnam & Klosinski, to appear). The empirical focus on this study takes a closer look at morphosyntactic portmanteaus; i.e., structures that include both lexical items from both source grammars, but also grammatical structures as well. In addition to providing an analysis for these structures, we show how models such as these are essential for current and future studies of bilingual grammars that seek to include both formal rigor and psycholinguistic methods.

Mike Putnam er lektor ved Tysk og Sprogvidenskab ved Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures (GSLL) ved The Pennsylvania State University. Hans alsidige og produktive forskning omfatter udgivelser inden for germansk sprogvidenskab, med særligt fokus på tysk og tyske dialekter i Europa og Nordamerika, to- og flersprogethed, kontaktlingvistik og krydsfeltet mellem kognition, grammatik og kultur. Mike Putnam er redaktør af bogserierne Studies in Germanic Linguistics (John Benjamins) og Studies in Bilingualism (John Benjamins) og af tidsskrifterne Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism og Yearbook of German-American Studies.