Abbreviations

For more information about the lecture halls and seminar rooms, see our lecture room page. The names listed under "Technical Assistance" are student volunteers who will act as a contact person for technical questions of the lecturers and workshop speakers during the course or workshop.

Bidirectional OT in natural language

In this course we will provide an introduction to bidirectional Optimality Theory in natural language, based on our joint book manuscript _Conflicts in Interpretation_ (http://www.let.rug.nl/~hendriks/conflict.htm). Bidirectional OT formalizes the view that a natural language grammar is a set of potentially conflicting constraints on forms and meanings, and that speakers take into account hearers and vice versa. This view will be discussed on the basis of the core linguistic issues of negation, word order and anaphora resolution. We will show how this approach leads to a reinterpretation of findings with respect to the relation between form and meaning within a language, stable and instable patterns of form and meaning across languages, and the development of a coherent pattern of form and meaning in children. Structure of the course: 1. Introduction, 2. Negation in the languages of the world, 3. Word order variation, 4. Language acquisition and production/comprehension asymmetries, 5. Current issues.