Welcome back to another exciting quarter of talks from the LVC workshop! We’re kicking things off with a talk from postdoc Lilia Rissman. So come join us in Rosenwald 301 this Friday, January 13th, at 3:30 PM. A light reception will follow the talk.

“Consistency and variability in the mapping from event concepts to event semantics”

Lilia Rissman
University of Chicago

Developing language requires constructing mappings between concepts and linguistic forms. This talk addresses the structure of this interface across languages: whether event concepts map to semantic structures in similar ways, and whether some concepts are more likely to be expressed in language than others. I focus in particular on verbal meaning, causation, instrumentality and voice, integrating evidence from English, Spanish, Mandarin, child homesign and Nicaraguan Sign Language. Taken together, these studies point toward a conceptual/semantic interface in which conceptual knowledge drives cross-linguistic similarities, but some concepts are expressed more variably than others.