Keynote Speakers
(Names are listed in alphabetical order.)
| Keynote Speakers |
Prof. Harald Baayen
University of Tübingen, Germany
- Title: The accumulation of knowledge and language variation
- Abstract: The history of mankind is characterized by constant change. One aspect of
this change is the rise, spread, and demise in time and space of civilizations
and religions. Another, perhaps more systematic, aspect of this constant
change is that technological innovations, and thanks to these innovations, the
amount of information available to agents in human societies has been
increasing exponentially. The accumulation of ever more differentiated
experiences is reflected in vocabulary size. Historical corpora show that in
languages such as German and English, the numbers of different words has been
increasing over time. Chinese and Vietnamese appear to have started out with
lexicons in which monosyllabic words were the norm, but with increasing
onomasiological needs, two-syllable (compound) words are now in the majority.
The accumulation of knowledge does not come without processing costs. Since
lexical entropy increases as vocabulary size increases, it is inevitable that
it will require more processing effort to locate words in or retrieve words
from the lexicon as experience accumulates.
In my presentation, I will present the results of investigations into the
consequences of the accumulation of knowledge at two time scales: the lifetimes
of individual speakers, and intervals of time spanning multiple generations of
speakers. The focus will be on how speakers and societies adapt to the
increasing processing demands that accrue over the years.
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Prof. Dirk Geeraerts
University of Leuven, Belgium
- Title: Onomasiological variation and lexical lectometry: Disentangling demotization and destandardization
- Abstract: This talk is situated at the crossroads of two fields of inquiry:
- on the one hand, the corpus-based study of lexical and semantic variation that has been the main focus of my research team since the publication of Geeraerts et al. 1994, The Structure of Lexical Variation. Meaning, naming and Context (Mouton);
- on the other hand, the sociolinguistic tradition initiated by Tore Kristiansen that looks at recent developments in the European languages in terms of 'destandardization' and 'demotization'.
Specifically, the talk argues
1) that the quantitative methods for onomasiological lectometry that derive from the first tradition (and which treat lexical variation among synonyms as a quantifiable sociolinguistic variable in the Labovian sense) help to clarify a number of issues related to the second tradition;
2) that the binary distinction between ‘destandardization’ and ‘demotization’ is not adequate enough to capture the multidimensional nature of standardization processes, in which the following three, mutually independent oppositions need to be distinguished:
- standardization versus destandardization, defined as a decrease or an increase of the differences between the levels in a stratificational continuum;
- formalization versus informalization, defined by the direction of standardization as just defined (from bottom layer to top layer or conversely);
- homogenization versus heterogenization, defined as an increase or decrease in the internal uniformity of a given layer, regardless of its relationship to the other layers.
These processes will be illustrated by means of a longitudinal study of contemporary Dutch, contrasting Netherlandic Dutch and Belgian Dutch, and zooming in on the relationship between formal and colloquial Belgian Dutch.
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Prof. Feng-fu Tsao
National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan
- Title: An Analysis of the Polysemous Word ‘Bao’－A Variational & Cognitive Approach
- Abstract: J. L. Austin in a seminal paper written in 1940 and published in 1961, pointed out the inadequacy of simply analyzing the different meanings of ‘cricket’ in phrases such as ‘a cricket bat’ and ‘a cricket ball’ and ‘a cricket umpire’ as simply ‘used in cricket’. This is because we cannot explain what we mean by ‘cricket’ except by explaining the special parts played in cricketing by the bat, ball, etc.
G. Lakoff(1987) in commenting on Austin’s analysis, further pointed out that it is a case of polysemy which involves what he and Johnson(1980) called Idealized Cognitive Model(ICM), that is a reader, when he sees the word ‘cricket’ as used in the above-mentioned phrases will have to invoke the ICM of cricketing to understand the meaning of the word ‘cricket’ in them.
In a similar manner we find the different senses the polysemous word bao‘爆’, as used in Taiwan Mandarin can all be explained by referring to the ICM of explosion. We also find that the polysemous word has developed different senses in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China, but these different senses are all related to the ICM of explosion.
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