Join us for a lecture by Kyle Gorman on three problems in the theory of inflectional gaps - a topic of interest to anyone interested in education, child development, and the development of languages.

A number of languages are known to exhibit inflectional gaps, the seemingly idiosyncratic absence of certain inflected forms of certain lexemes. For example in English, many speakers have gaps in the paradigms of verbs such as beware, get lost, scram, stride and forgo, and more pervasive gaps are reported in other languages. Inflectional gaps pose three major problems for linguistic theory. The first, the actuation problem, deals with how gaps emerge. The second, the acquisition problem, is concerned with how gaps are learned by children. The third, the representation problem, deals with how gaps are mentally represented by adults. In this talk, I will review what we know about these three problems, drawing on data from a number of languages, particularly Russian, and focusing on recent work computationally modeling the acquisition of inflectional gaps.

Sponsored by the Department of Linguistics & Language Development. For questions, please contact Dr. Jon Rawski (jon.rawski@sjsu.edu)