Workshop on Approaches to Slavic Morphology

语言学的主要目标之一是通过研究语言的共同之处和不同之处来了解人类的思想。这些共性和差异确定了人类认知的特征，这些特征可能是天生的，也可能是通过学习产生的。这种先天与后天的差异在词法领域，也就是对单词结构的研究中表现得尤为突出。英语等语言的单词结构相对简单——一个名词可以有三种不同的形式（“book”、“books”、“book’s”），动词可以有多达四种形式（“write”、“writes”、“written”、“written”）。另一方面，斯拉夫语系的语言，包括捷克语、俄语、塞尔维亚语，以其形态复杂而臭名昭著——一个名词可以有多达14种形式，动词可以有多达60种形式。然而，语言学家已经证明，在英语等语言的句子结构和斯拉夫语等词形丰富的语言中复杂单词的结构之间存在相似之处。一些语言学家认为，这些相似之处是由于人类大脑天生的语言能力的结构，但其他人认为，这种相似之处可能是由于人类学习复杂模式的方式而产生的，这些学习机制并不一定是特定于语言的。语言学通过详细研究语言和语系的结构，并通过实验和人类语言学习的计算模拟来支持不同的理论，从而解决了这些争论。这是一个关于斯拉夫形态学方法的特别研讨会，它将作为年度会议斯拉夫语言学正式方法的一部分，这是北美斯拉夫语言研究的主要场所。虽然该会议已进入第24个年头，但它从未包括形态学研讨会。讲习班将邀请三位对形态学研究做出重大贡献的特邀演讲者，特别是斯拉夫语。在匿名的竞争性审查基础上，还将接受另外8项谈判。研讨会将汇集各种形态学的观点，汇集了一方面专门研究斯拉夫语的研究人员和另一方面的形态学研究人员。参加者将被鼓励提出关于意义、声音和单词结构之间关系的基本问题的研究。研讨会将重点介绍三位年轻女性学者的研究。它还将向学生提供会议组织方面的培训，并资助他们参加讲习班。

One of the main goals of linguistics is to understand the human mind by studying what languages have in common and how they differ. These commonalities and differences identify features of human cognition that might be innate, and features that arise through learning. This nature-nurture divide is striking in the area of morphology, the study of word structure. The word structure of languages such as English is relatively simple--a noun can have three different forms ('book', 'books', 'book's'), and verbs can have up to four ('write', 'writes', 'wrote', 'written'). On the other hand, languages in the Slavic family, which includes Czech, Russian, Serbian, are notorious for their morphological complexity--a noun can have up to fourteen forms, and verbs can have as many as sixty. Yet linguists have shown that there are parallels between the structure of sentences in languages such as English and the structure of complex words in morphologically rich languages such as Slavic. Some linguists believe that these parallels are due to the structure of the innate language faculty of the human mind, but others argue that the similarities can arise because of the way humans learn complex patterns, and these learning mechanisms are not necessarily specific to language. The science of linguistics resolves such debates by investigating the structure of languages and language families in detail, and by supporting different theories with experiments and computational simulations of human language learning. This proposal is for a Special Workshop on Approaches to Slavic Morphology, which will be held as part of the annual conference Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics--the premier venue for research on Slavic languages in North America. While the conference is in its twenty-fourth year, it has never included a morphology workshop. The workshop will feature three invited speakers who have made major contributions to research on morphology in general and Slavic in particular. There will be eight additional talks accepted based on anonymous, competitive review. The workshop will bring together a variety of perspectives on morphology, bringing together researchers who specialize in Slavic on the one hand and morphology on the other. Participants will be encouraged to present research that addresses fundamental questions about the relationship between meaning, sound, and word structure. The workshop will highlight the research of three junior women scholars. It will furthermore offer students training in conference organization, as well as subsidize their participation in the workshop.