Workshop on Language Processing and Language Evolution: Special Session at the 2017 CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing

描述人类大脑将语言形式与某种意义表达联系起来的过程--这是人类独有的过程--是语言学领域的一个中心目标。在一个语言障碍和外语学习日益重要、新媒体和新形式的语言使用(例如在互联网上)发挥着越来越大的作用、寻求赋予计算机理解人类语言的算法正在激增并对日常生活产生越来越大影响的世界里，理解这一过程具有实用价值。在心理语言学领域，最常见的方法是把语言看作是给定的，并研究人类用这些语言理解和产生话语的过程。在这里，利用功能语言学、数量类型学和进化论的思想，研讨会参与者将探索相反的方法。以人类信息处理的一些知识为基础，参与者将研究语言之间的系统差异，语言内部语法结构的差异，以及语言结构的历时产生和发展。利用这种语言进化观，演讲者将讨论关于加工和语言结构之间关系的新假设，并阐明人类语言如何在说话人内部和随着时间的推移而运作。该项目是为一次特别会议“语言处理和语言演变”准备的，该会议将与纽约市立大学第三十届人类句子处理年度会议同时举行。纽约州立大学人类句子处理会议是北美对人类如何理解和创造语言感兴趣的科学家们的首要活动。大会定期收到300多份摘要，涉及大约35个口头陈述时段和150个海报时段。大约400名科学家(教师、博士后、研究生和本科生)作为听众和演讲者出席了会议。与会者来自美国和加拿大各地，以及欧洲、澳大利亚、东亚和拉丁美洲。作为一个跨学科论坛，这次会议非常成功，吸引了来自语言学、心理学、计算机科学、教育、神经科学和哲学等领域的研究人员。特别会议旨在通过从语言进化模型的角度对人类学习和使用的语言系统进行更丰富的描述来扩展我们目前对语言处理的知识：这些语言系统是如何变成现在的样子的。讲习班参与者将探讨人类语言如何受到信息处理限制的影响。最终目标是创造一幅更现实和更具代表性的图景，展示不同语言之间的多样性，以及人类大脑如何表现和处理这些语言。

It is a central goal of the field of linguistics to characterize the process by which the human brain links the forms of language with some representation of meaning--a process unique to humans. Understanding this process has practical value in a world where language barriers and foreign language learning are increasingly important, where new media and new forms of language use (for example, as on the Internet) play an increasingly large role, and where algorithms that seek to bestow computers with understanding of human languages are proliferating and have increasing impact on day-to-day life. Within the field of psycholinguistics, the most common approach is to take languages as given and to study the processes by which humans comprehend and produce utterances in those languages. Here, using ideas from functional linguistics, quantitative typology, and evolution, workshop participants will explore the reverse approach. Taking some knowledge of human information processing as given, participants will examine systematic differences among languages, variation among grammatical constructions within languages, and the diachronic emergence and development of language structures. Using this evolutionary view of language, presenters will discuss novel hypotheses about the relationships between processing and linguistic structure, and shed new light on how human language operates both within speakers and over time. This project is for a special conference session, Language Processing and Language Evolution, to be held in conjunction with the 30th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. The CUNY Human Sentence Processing conference is the premier event in North America for scientists interested in how humans comprehend and produce language. The conference regularly receives well over 300 abstracts for roughly 35 oral presentation slots and 150 poster slots. Approximately 400 scientists (faculty, postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students) attend the conference as audience members and presenters. Conference attendees come from all over the United States and Canada, and from Europe, Australia, East Asia and Latin America. The conference has been remarkably successful as an interdisciplinary forum, drawing researchers from the fields of linguistics, psychology, computer science, education, neuroscience, and philosophy. The special session is designed to extend our current knowledge of language processing by providing a richer characterization of the linguistic systems that humans learn and use, from the perspective of models of language evolution: how these linguistic systems got to be the way they are. Workshop participants will explore how human languages have and have not been shaped by information processing constraints. The ultimate goal is to create a more realistic and representative picture of diversity among languages and of how the human mind represents and processes those languages.