The Language Faculty

The Language Faculty is an international network of scholars interested in human language that meets once a year at the Université de Nantes. The first meeting was held on 2 June 2017.
The network is dedicated at promoting research in formal linguistics and the biological basis of human language in the language departments of French universities. It operates in tight connection with the international research community.

Organisation et contact : Martin Haiden - martin.haiden (at) univ-nantes.fr

The Language Faculty 2019: Linguistics and the Brain Sciences  

Les Journées scientifiques de l'Université de Nantes

21 June 2019

La Cité, Centre des Congrès de Nantes
Registration is required, but free of charge.


The 2019 instalment of the Language Faculty will explore the research agenda for linguistic inquiry beyond the traditional frontiers of humanities. The following questions will be addressed:
 
  • Which aspects of psychology, neuroscience, or other related fields are of interest for linguistic theory? Why do we want to understand those aspects? What can we hope to learn from integrating them into linguistic research? What do we already know, and what can we hope to learn in the near future?
  • What can linguistic theory contribute to neighbouring fields? Are there questions in grammatical theory that particularly call for interdisciplinary or experimental research? How do we need to re/state linguistic questions in order to make them amenable to experimental and/or interdisciplinary research?
  • Is there a continuity in the generative research paradigm that we can trace from early, introspection-based research to the questions dealt with today in research on acquisition, processing, imagery, and other experimental paradigms? Are there domains of linguistic inquiry that had to be fundamentally re-thought in order to leverage new methodologies? Has this changed the way we think of language now, as compared to our views a few decades ago?

These questions will be discussed by a panel of highly respected scholars in the respective domains:
   

Program

9hoo - 9h3o Welcome
9h3o - 1oh3o Alec Marantz Linguistics as Cognitive Neuroscience:  What I've learned from studying word recognition.
1oh45 - 11h45 James Magnuson Emergent phonology in a shallow model of human speech recognition.
12hoo - 13h3o Lunch
13h3o - 14h3o Cynthia Fisher How children use sentence and discourse structure to learn about words.
14h3o - 15hoo Coffee
15hoo - 16hoo Carlo Cecchetto Manipulating syntax in the brain.
16h15 - 17h15 Yosef Grodzinsky Brain bases for language and logic.
 

 

The Language Faculty 2018

Friday 1 June 2018

UMR 6310 LLING, salle 1, bâtiment STAPS

 

Programme

9h30 - 10h00 Welcome
10h00 - 11h00 Henk van Riemsdijk Non-canonical trees -- some old and new thoughts
11h00 - 12h00 Martin Haiden Time and again: On formal features in phonology, and what they do to Bavarian determiners
12jh00 - 14h00 Lunch
14h00 - 15h00 Anamaria Falaus Multiple free relatives
15h00 - 15h15 Coffee
15h15 - 16h15 Patricia Cabredo Hofherr Distributive numerals and distributive configurations
16h15 - 17h15 Elena Herburger German eher and epistemic modality
17h15 - 18h LF business matters
 

 

The Language Faculty 2017

Friday 2 June 2017

UMR 6310 LLING, salle C248, bâtiment Censive
 

Programme

10h30 - 11h00 Welcome and introduction
11h00 - 12h00 Josef Bayer (Konstanz): Criterial Freezing in the Syntax of Particles
12h00 - 13h00 Gerhard Schaden (Lille) & Martin Salzmann (Leipzig): The Syntax and Semantics of Inflected Participles in Alemannic German
13h - 15h00 Lunch
15h00 - 16h00 Winnie Lechner (Athènes): Phrasal Comparatives, Reflexivization and Parasitic Scope
16h00 - 17h00 Martin Haiden (Nantes): German reflexives: lexicon and syntax
17h00 - 17h15 Coffee break
17h15 - 18h00 Round table: Formal grammar in language departments
 

Mis à jour le 04 June 2019.