Workshop on Events in Language and Cognition 2016

语言和交流是人类的基本。在所有动物中，只有人类可以告诉彼此他们的想法，并传递沿着建议、指示、警告和其他想法。尽管在理解语法等语言的形式属性方面取得了巨大的科学和技术进步，但人们对语言如何传达思想却知之甚少。一个主要原因是，为了解释语言如何传达思想，我们需要了解思想本身的结构。我们对思维的结构还不太了解，特别是当我们想到一些事情时（比如盖房子、吃晚饭等等）。 因此，我们对语言如何传达事件的理解特别差。没有这一缺失的部分，我们对人性的理解是不完整的，我们的语言技术也是有限的。解释人类如何使用语言来描述和讨论事件的一个困难是，除了事件是高度抽象的，因此很难研究之外，关于事件表征的工作分散在不同的科学领域，具有不同的理论基础，方法和术语。本次研讨会旨在弥合这些分歧，将主要研究人员聚集在一起，分享最新进展，评估研究状况，建立研究领域之间的联系，并规划未来的发展方向。为期一天的研讨会将包括两个特邀演讲，七个陪审团演讲，一个海报会议，约20张海报，以及一个闭幕式讨论。海报会议将有助于确保学生有充分的机会进行演示和参与。为了与会议的跨学科重点保持一致，一位受邀演讲者是语言学家，另一位是专门研究语言习得的心理学家，最后的讨论将由两位从非语言学角度研究事件的研究人员领导。评审演讲和海报的选择将着眼于资历、人口统计、研究传统和感兴趣现象的多样性。该研讨会与首屈一指的美国心理语言学会议（纽约市立大学人类句子处理会议）位于同一地点，因为该会议的许多与会者都具有与语言和思维相关的研究专业知识。

Language and communication are fundamental to being human. Alone of all animals, humans can tell one another their thoughts and pass along proposals, instructions, warnings, and other ideas. Despite great scientific and technological advances in understanding formal properties of language such as grammar, relatively little is known about how language conveys thought. One major reason is that in order to explain how language conveys thought, we need to understand the structure of thought itself. The structure of thought is not well understood, particularly when it comes to thoughts about events (building a house, eating dinner, etc.). As a result, our understanding of how language conveys events is particularly poor. Without this missing piece, our understanding of human nature is incomplete and our language technology is limited. One difficulty in accounting for how humans use language to describe and discuss events is that--in addition to the fact that events are highly abstract and thus difficult to study--work on event representations is scattered across different scientific fields with different theoretical underpinnings, methods, and terminologies. This workshop has been organized to bridge these differences by bringing together leading researchers to share recent advances, assess the state of the research, build ties between research fields, and plot a way forward.The one-day workshop will consist of two invited presentations, seven juried talks, a poster session with approximately 20 posters, and a closing discussion. The poster session will help ensure ample opportunity for student presentations and involvement. In keeping with the interdisciplinary focus of the meeting, one invited speaker is a linguist and the other is a psychologist who specializes in language acquisition, and the closing discussion will be led by two researchers who study events from a non-linguistic perspective. Juried talks and posters will be chosen with an eye towards diversity in seniority, demographics, research tradition, and phenomenon of interest. The workshop is co-located with the premier American psycholinguistics conference (the CUNY Human Sentence Processing conference), since many attendees at that conference have research expertise relating to both language and thought.