Poznan09

Language Games

Mary Ann Walter

The focus of this course is forms of language (language games~play languages~ludlings) which are external to the core grammar of a language. We will discuss what these can reveal about the structure of the ambient language and of language in general. In addition, we will discuss experimental work involving artificial languages, which – like play languages – involve the manipulation of native language properties to shed light on linguistic structure.

Readings (to be made available electronically):
Gomez, Rebecca and LouAnn Gerken. 2000. Infant Artificial Language Learning and Language Acquisition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4(5), 178-186.

Idsardi, Bill and Eric Raimy. 2005. Remarks on language play. Ms.
Laycock, Don. 1972. Towards a Typology of Ludlings, or Play-Languages. Linguistic Communications 6.

Nevins, Andrew and Ansgar Endress. 2007. The Edge of Order: Analytic Bias in Ludlings. In Jeremy Rau, Keith Plaster, Patrick Liu and Yaroslav Gorbachov (eds.), Harvard Working Papers in Linguistics 12.

Nevins, Andrew and Bert Vaux. 2003. Metalinguistic, Shmetalinguistic: The Phonology of Shm-Reduplication. Proceedings of the 39th Chicago Linguistic Society.

Pycha, Anne, Pawel Novak, E. Shin, and Ryan Shosted. 2003. Phonological Rule-Learning and the Implications for a Theory of Vowel Harmony. Proceedings of the 22nd West Coast Conference in Linguistics, 101-113.

Saffran, J. E. Newport, R. Aslin. 1996. Word Segmentation: The Role of Distributional Cues. Journal of Memory and Language 35, 606-621.

Wilson, Colin. Learning Phonology with Substantive Bias: An Experimental and Computational Study of Velar Palatalization. Cognitive Science 30, 945-982.

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