巴西语言学会(Abralin, Associação Brasileira de Linguística)在疫情期间广泛联络世界各地知名语言学家，策划了Abralin Ao Vivo(即 Linguists Online)系列讲座，自去年5月起通过YouTube频道向全球直播。获邀参加的语言学家已超过百位，可谓大师云集，规模空前。陕西师大语言与认知研究所(CogLing.cn)与Abralin达成合作，获得独家内容授权，通过本微信公号向中国学者同行独家转发该系列讲座精选内容。
今日发布精选集第28期，主讲人威廉·奥格雷迪 (William O’Grady)，讲座题目“Natural Syntax – An Emergentist Perspective“，直播时间为2021年10月19日。本讲座视频英文字幕为本公号后期制作，限于精力，未经逐字校对，敬请谅解。
William O’Grady
威廉·奥格雷迪 简介
William Delany O’Grady (born 1952) is a professor in linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His research focuses on syntactic theory, language acquisition, Korean and heritage language. He is also affiliated with the Center for Korean Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa as a full member and the Island Studies Program at the University of Prince Edward Island as an adjunct professor and graduate faculty member. O’Grady’s work on syntactic theory and language acquisition focuses on emergentism, the idea that complex systems are best understood by investigating the interaction of more basic forces and propensities. He has written many articles about emergentism and its approaches to language for the general reader, including “An Emergentist Approach to Syntax” (2010), which summarizes the emergentist approach to the study of sentence formation.Many of the points raised in this article were developed in more detail in his book Syntactic Carpentry: An Emergentist Approach to Syntax (2005), in which O’Grady shows how the defining properties of various core syntactic phenomena follow from the operation of a linear, efficiency-driven processor.
讲座英文摘要
Language is one of nature’s most mysterious phenomena. Its workings have eluded scholars for thousands of years, and there is no reason to think that a major breakthrough is at hand. The danger of a deep irony is real: the quest to explain language may lie beyond the reach of the only creatures who are able to use it. One avenue of inquiry that has shown some promise in recent years remains lightly explored. It takes as its starting point emergence, the process whereby the interaction of simple components, forces and events produces a complex system with its own novel properties. Drawing on a classic set of syntactic phenomena from the literature on formal syntax, I will outline an explanatory framework that seeks to understand the syntax of form and meaning by reference to factors such as memory, prediction and processing cost that have a natural and well established role in cognition.
讲座视频
公号菜单路径：视频——Abralin
推荐阅读（点击获取PDF）
O’Grady, W. (2010). An emergentist approach to syntax. In The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis, ed. by H. Narrog & B. Heine. Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 257-83.