The University of Groningen will host a series of nine lectures on productivity, co-financed by LOT, the Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics. Research Master and PhD students who want to join one or more of the events will receive a reimbursement for their travel expenses from LOT.
The lectures can be joined also online here: https://meet.google.com/ojw-oshg-fzw
The first appointment is with Jenny Audring (Leiden University), on “The importance of being unproductive”. Please register here for attending one or more lectures. The line-up includes lectures from Kristian Berg (University of Bonn), Tanja Säily (University of Helsinki), Harald Baayen (University of Tübingen) and Jóhanna Barðdal (Ghent University) among others.
Why a lecture series on productivity especially aimed at graduate students?
The concept of productivity in natural languages defines a central property of language, i.e. the creative potential which allows speakers to produce and understand language that they have never heard before, as the Dutch complex (nonce) words bekoffiën, opbelbaar or kunstelijk, or the famous English sentence colorless green ideas sleep furiously. This creative potential is important to multiple approaches in theoretical linguistics, from generative linguistics to construction grammar, but the concept of productivity is also commonly encountered in linguistic typology, descriptive linguistics and other empirical approaches in linguistics. Definitions of what productive processes are vary greatly, as well as the methodology used to survey them. Also, productivity can be viewed as a binary property, or rather as a continuum with shades; it can be conceived of as a property of specific schemas or rather as a relative concept. In the end, comparing research papers from different schools and approaches may give the impression of a very scattered field, making hard to relate research results and identify relevant factors.
This lecture series aims at exploring the concept of productivity in linguistics from different theoretical perspectives (innatism vs usage-based; diachronic vs synchronic), at different layers of linguistic analysis (morphology vs syntax), in different subfields (psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics and typology), and crucially through different methodologies (corpus based vs experimental).
Maria Mazzoli, PhD 