*【專題演講】Grammar and time in contrast: A case for multidisciplinary research(12/19)
- 日期 : 2024/12/19 14:00
- 地點 : 人社中心第一會議室及webex線上會議室（hybrid）
會議連結：https://reurl.cc/5Dkvnv
會議號： 2511 797 5731
密碼：1219
- 演講者 : Aymeric Collart / Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica
- 演講摘要 : Without noticing it, we are surrounded by language, and we use it every day to perform many tasks. Some of them are closely related to the notion of time: we plan our day ahead, we share past stories, we recall what we did during the day or in the past weeks. However, the range of the possibilities to put words to describe such situations is constrained by the grammar of the language we speak. In this talk, I focus on the grammatical resources available in (Taiwan) Mandarin to denote a situation that happened in the past. Specifically, I concentrate on three markers: (a) -le (as in zuotian ni chi-le shenme 你昨天吃了什麼 ‘what did you eat yesterday?’), (b) -guo (as in wo zhiqian qu-guo riben 我之前去過日本 ‘I have been to Japan once before’), and (c) ‘you + verb’ (as in wo zuotian you qu kan ni de yanchu 我昨天有去看你的演出 ‘I saw you performing yesterday’). The aim of this talk is to understand the meaning of these three markers and what they are used for when referring to a past event: Do they convey a similar meaning, or do they form a contrastive mechanism within the grammatical temporal system of (Taiwan) Mandarin?
This question has been raised by theoretical linguists, and many divergent analyses have been proposed for these three markers. I bring forward another perspective by looking at this question using quantitative methods. Taking the different linguistic analyses as a starting point, I tested them against naturalistic data using oral corpora (Collart & Su, 2022; Collart, in preparation-a), allowing me to provide a fine-grained and quantified description of these three markers. I then carried out behavioral and neuroimaging studies to identify the cognitive mechanisms they reflect through their online processing patterns (acceptability judgments: Collart, 2024; event-related potentials: Collart & Chan, 2021). While the combination of these methods is helpful in clarifying the nature of the grammatical temporal system of (Taiwan) Mandarin, it also allows me to re-examine these three markers and their use in different contexts and genres, such as in an argumentative discourses/debates (Collart, in preparation-b).
In sum, this talk will highlight (a) the omnipresence of language in our everyday lives and the impact of grammatical constraints on our communication patterns, and (b) the benefits of embracing the quantitative and multidisciplinary turn in our research.
- 主辦單位 : 調查研究專題中心
- 聯絡人 : csrevent@gate.sinica.edu.tw 謝小姐
