Academic Lecture Sponsored by School of Foreign Languages

Time: April 21, 2021 (Wednesday) 2:00pm -- 3:30

Venue: Room 210, Chongyuan Building

topic: Are sentences made of words: a problem of circularity

Speaker: Professor Ning Chunyan( Hunan University）

Abstract

There is nothing wrong with the statement that a hand is made of fingers. But you cannot say that there is a box containing fingers out of which a hand is physiologically generated since a hand grows as it is as an organic whole. Unfortunately , many studies are content with the belief that sentences are made of words. The question is, can we cay that there is a pre-syntax lexicon storing words from which words are picked up for syntax to generate sentences? If yes, where do those words in the pre-syntax lexicon come from? If they come from sentence, is there a vicious circulation around when we pick up words for making sentences from lexicon which stores words from the sentences we make?

Speaker

NING Chunyan visited Department of Linguistic & Philosophy as a Fulbright scientist at MIT, 1984-84, obtained his MA degree in linguistics at Cornell University in 1987, his PhD. Degree in linguistics at UC Irvine. Afterward, he has been working as Professor in generative linguistics at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Hunan University, City University of HongKong, Chinese University of HongKong and Tianjin Normal University. His concentration lies in the areas of syntax, biolinguistics, language acquisition and language disorder. He is the leading researcher of three state-funded projects: Formal Linguistics, Introduction to Biolinguistics and Assessment Scale of the Linguistic Competence of Preschool Mandarin-speaking Children, his publications include Research to Establish the Validity, Reliability and Clinical Utility of a Comprehensive Language Assessment of Mandarin，Journal of Auditory 2015 (co-authored), Semantic Acquisition of Mandarin Children and Generative Grammar in Mainland China in Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics (2014) Brill, among others.

All are welcome.

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