Fiona Kirton<\/a> The University of Edinburgh<\/em><\/p>\n Wednesday, 30.09.2020 Why do languages look the way they do? This question lies at the core of much of linguistics research, and answering it can shine a light on the relationship between individual cognitive biases and linguistic structure. One area that has attracted particular attention is basic word order. Many languages exhibit a fixed or dominant ordering of subject (S), object (O), and verb (V); it has been suggested that SOV is the natural ordering of entities in an event, and the default order used by all newly emerging languages. A growing body of research has investigated this question using the silent gesture paradigm in which participants describe events using only gesture and no speech. This work has uncovered a range of factors that influence the way people convey information about events in the absence of linguistic conventions, challenging the view that there is a single natural order. One particularly fruitful line of work has focused on the relationship between animacy and word order, and a number of hypotheses have emerged that seek to explain the nature of this relationship.<\/p>\n In this thesis, I present a number of experiments that build on this work to investigate how properties of individual referents influence word order choices in emerging communication systems. Using a range of experimental approaches, I investigated three proposed drivers of word order variation: salience, modality, and communication. The results of this work support the hypothesis that the salience of referents is a key factor in shaping word order in emerging communication systems. However, the findings were inconclusive about the precise mechanisms underlying this relationship. I suggest that further work is required to better understand the contribution of factors such as modality and native language interference in experimental settings. I also highlight the need for further research to understand how language producers negotiate the communicative challenge of accurately conveying information about events in which the role of referents is ambiguous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Rerent properties and word order in emerging communication systems Fiona Kirton The University of Edinburgh Wednesday, 30.09.2020 15:00 – 15:30 Room: [virtual Zoom talk] Why do languages look the way they do? This question lies at the core of much of linguistics research, and answering it can shine a light on the relationship between individual … Continue reading September 30th: Fiona Kirton Pre-Viva Talk<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-talks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3547"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3549,"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3547\/revisions\/3549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n15:00 – 15:30
\nRoom: [virtual Zoom talk]<\/p>\n