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Benjamin Van Durme
Departments of Computer Science and Cognitive Science, and the Center for Language and Speech Processing, Johns Hopkins University -
Su-Youn Yoon
Educational Testing Service (ETS) -
Emily Tucker Prud'hommeaux
Departments of Computer Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester -
Mitch Marcus
Department of Computer Science, University of Pennsylvania -
PLC 37 (March 22-24, 2013)
schedule | coming soon -
PLC 36 (March 23-25, 2012)
schedule | proceedings -
PLC 35 (March 18-20, 2011)
schedule | proceedings -
PLC 34 (March 19-21, 2010)
schedule | proceedings -
PLC 33 (March 27-29, 2009)
schedule | proceedings -
PLC 32 (February 22-24, 2008)
schedule | proceedings -
PLC 31 (February 23-25, 2007)
schedule | proceedings
Penn Linguistics Conference
The 38th Annual Penn Linguistics Conference will take place March 28-30, 2014 at the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia, PA.
PLC is a conference in linguistics run by the graduate students in the Department of Linguistics in collaboration with the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
This event is supported by funding from SASgov, the student government for graduate students in the School of Arts and Sciences, thanks to the Interdisciplinary Funding and Merit Funding grants, as well as funding from GAPSA, the Graduate and Professional Students' Association at the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Pennsylvania Department of Linguistics.
The program of PLC 38 is made possible by support from Penn's Year of Sound, GAPSA, and SASGov.
Invited Speaker: John Ohala
Talk title: "The Logic Underlying Underlying Representations"
It is a natural human (and non-human) impulse to try to understand the meaning or functionality of observations by reference to something underlying or hidden. In linguistics, etymological work by the Ancient Indians, Greeks and Romans some 2 millennia ago are a manifestation of this. Although initial work in this area was largely speculative it was gradually refined by comparative linguistics, which achieved some scientific maturity beginning in the mid-17th c. (Boxhorn 1647) and continuing up to the 19th c. through the well-known work of Sajnovics, Ihre, Rask, Grimm, etc. In the late 19th c. reconstructions of parent forms - both across languages and within a given language ("internal reconstruction") achieved some success. Although initially the products of internal reconstructions were explicitly regarded as entities from the languages' past, in the mid-1960s, generative phonology took (some of) them as something psychological, i.e., part of native speakers' tacit knowledge. Such underlying representations (URs) were said to enable speakers to recognize a relationship between words manifesting regular inflectional or derivational patterns. This assumption was hotly debated but was accepted by many, if not most, phonologists. Traces of this assumption can be found in Optimality Theory (OT) where different but related words are derived - synchronically, not diachronically - from common URs that yields different surface forms subject to a set of rank ordered constraints. OT has also been invoked to account for patterns in phonotactics and in first and second language learning. I argue that although speculation should be unconstrained and wide ranging, all assumptions and practices in determining URs - whether diachronic or synchronic - need to be examined epistemologically and tested empirically. I will do some of both.
Special Panel - The Interface of Linguistics and Language Technology
In honor of the University of Pennsylvania "Year of Sound".
Date: Friday, March 28, 2014
Invited panel speakers:
Previous Conferences
Proceedings of previous conferences are on the the Penn Working Papers in Linguistics website. Through PLC 30 the PWPL was an in-print publication and a hard-copy volume can be ordered. Since PLC 31 the PWPL has been a free-access online publication only.