Eva Wittenberg: Complex structures over time: Extracting our mental models of events from language

We invite students and staff to the next lecture in the Roman Jakobson Seminar series, this time by Professor Eva Wittenberg from Central European University in Vienna. Prof. Wittenberg is a renowned psycholinguist specializing in meaning. She is the first international guest speaker in this series.

Prof. Wittenberg will be with us for the entire afternoon and will be available for consultations and discussions. If you would like to take advantage of this opportunity, feel free to do so. In the evening, we will go out for dinner together, and you are welcome to join us.

Abstract:
Language can be studied as a Fodorian module: How does a system work, what are its rules or constraints, and how can we formalize them? But language can also be studied as part of our overall cognition: How do the rules and constraints a language contains allow us to understand each others’ thoughts, and how can we know the shape of these thoughts? In my work as a psycholinguist, I mainly take the second approach. In this talk, I will focus on the complex structures of events which we infer from linguistic messages – or from more general cognitive mechanisms. I will present data from experiments conducted over the last ten years that start to answer these questions using different methods.