LANGUAGE WITHOUT GRAMMAR: IMPLICATIONS FOR APPLIED LINGUISTS

William O'Grady
The University of Hawaii at Manoa
ogrady@hawaii.edu

Sunday, March 23, 2003, 11:30 AM-12:30 PM plenary
Room: Commonwealth South

Abstract
My presentation will outline an approach to syntactic computation that is compatible with the emergentist thesis that the key properties of human language follow from more basic non-linguistic forces rather than from a grammar, as traditionally assumed. More particularly, I will argue that the mechanisms that are required to account for the traditional concerns of syntactic theory (e.g. the design of phrase structure, pronoun interpretation, agreement, contraction, structure dependence, and the like) are identical to the mechanisms that are independently required to account for how sentences are processed from 'left-to-right' in real time.

The key proposal involves an efficiency-driven linear computational system that operates from 'left to right', building structure by combining words and resolving their lexical requirements at the first opportunity. As I will explain, such a computational system is nothing but a processor that seeks to minimize the burden on working memory (the pool of operational resources that holds representations and supports computations on them).

The implications of this perspective will be explored for a series of issues confronting applied linguistics, including various problem in language acquisition, language teaching, and language loss.

Biography
William O'Grady (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He is the author of numerous articles and several books, including Categories and case (Benjamins, 1991), Syntactic development (Chicago, 1997), and How children learn language (Cambridge, to appear). He has a long-standing interest in alternatives to Universal Grammar for understanding why language is the way it is and how it is acquired. His current research focuses on the unification of the theory of sentence structure and the theory of sentence processing with a view to showing that the key properties of human language are better explained with reference to the functioning of a simple processor than to principles of grammar.