22-03-2024 Gemma Boleda. Cognitive and communicative pressures on the lexicon
22-03-2024 Gemma Boleda. Cognitive and communicative pressures on the lexicon
18.03.2024
Seminar organised as part of the CBC seminars. Check the web for the complete program of this seminar series (they are not regularly added to the events site of the MdM program).
FRIDAY, March 22, 2024, at 12:00 CET, UPF Ciutadella Campus aula 24.009
Gemma Boleda
from Universitat Pompeu Fabra
invited by Juan Manuel Toro
will give a talk entitled
Cognitive and communicative pressures on the lexicon
Abstract: Humans face a conundrum: we have a limited cognitive system, but need to communicate about a potentially infinite set of entities and situations. This has all kinds of interesting implications for how our languages are shaped, and how we use them. In this talk, I will focus on the implications for the lexicon, reporting on a series of large-scale studies covering language production, acquisition, and evolution. More specifically, I will examine the effects of cognitive and communicative pressures on how meanings are organized into words, as well as how naming behavior is shaped by the interaction between the properties of the lexicon, on the one hand, and the properties of the objects we want to talk about, on the other.