Nuts and Core
Dates: July 29-30, 2005
Times:
Friday, 8:30am-5pm
Saturday, 8:30am-12pm
Location: Harvard, Emerson 101

A current trend in linguistic theorizing returns to the construction-specific approach (Goldberg 1995, Culicover 1999, Goldberg & Jackendoff 2004). In Culicover's terms, language contains "nuts": constructions that are restricted to specific lexical items but nevertheless interact with general grammatical principles. This workshop addresses these challenges from the perspective of language learnability and development: how does one reconcile nuts with the grammatical "core" (Chomsky 1981)

• If the core is dispensed with, how does the learner go from specific constructions to general regularities in syntax (Tomasello 2003)?  What kind of constraints are needed for learning to be efficient and successful?

• If the core is to be maintained, how might one construe a principled theory that keeps the core and the nuts separate (Fodor 2001)?  How does the setting of a parameter values tolerate exceptions?

Speakers:
Bob Berwick (MIT)
Peter Culicover (Ohio State)
Marcel den Dikken (CUNY)
Jerry Feldman (Berkeley)
Lila Gleitman (Penn)
Adele Goldberg (Princeton)
Howard Lasnik (UConn)
Michael Tomasello (MPI, Leipzig)
David Pesetsky (MIT)

Organizer:
Charles Yang (Yale)

Contact:
charles.yang@alum.mit.edu

Thanks to Jerry Feldman and David Thaw at UC Berkeley, we have set up an online forum to workshop participants and the linguistic community at large to exchange papers and ideas. To post papers and comments, a free registration is required but downloading and viewing papers is open to all.
Please visit http://nuts.icsi.berkeley.edu for details.