Speakers

Originally from Belgium, Dr. Divjak completed her Undergraduate and Postgraduate training in Slavonic Philology at the KULeuven, Belgium. She also holds a Degree in Teaching Modern Foreign Languages from the same institution. After she had spent a year in Poland specializing in Polish Language and Culture (UJ Krakow, Poland), she returned to Alma Mater to teach Russian at the Undergraduate level. She embarked on a PhD in linguistics, funded by the Research Council (FWO Flanders), in 2000.

After obtaining her PhD in 2004, she spent one year at the UNC at Chapel Hill (USA, 2004-2005) as a BAEF Francqui Fellow and one year at the University of Stockholm (Sweden, 2005-2006) as a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation (FWO Flanders). 

Dr. Divjak joined the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies at the University of Sheffield (UK) in September 2006 as a Lecturer in Slavonic Languages and Linguistics and was promoted to Chair in 2018. She has held a wide range of administrative and leadership roles. Notably, as Director of Russian & Polish she leads and revamped UG language programs in Russian and Polish and as Director of the Centre for Linguistic Research she leads on the establishment of the HumLab, an experimental facility for interdisciplinary research in Arts & Humanities. 

In January 2019, Dr. Divjak joined the University of Birmingham as Professorial Research Fellow and is working with the Out of our Minds team to understand language and make language learning a more natural and rewarding experience. 

Abstract: Learning from exposure: an interdisciplinary approach to emergence 

Prof. Dr. Dagmar Divjak

Department of Modern Languages

University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom

Usage-based linguistics is predicated upon the premise that languages are dynamic systems that emerge from usage and are shaped by usage in a process that is mediated by general cognitive abilities and functional considerations. But what kinds of patterns emerge from usage, and what kind of process would enable the emergence of these patterns has remained underspecified. In my talk I will present work carried out together with members of my research team [https://outofourminds.bham.ac.uk] that sets out to change the ways in which languages are described, modelled and taught by taking an interdisciplinary approach anchored in what is known about learning. Using findings from our work on English and Polish nominal and verbal systems, I will show how a combination of corpus analytical techniques, experimental methods and computational algorithms that implement principles of learning allow us to study what kinds of patterns might be picked up if usage is indeed learned from exposure to the ambient language, in L1 and L2. I will argue that an approach driven by learning-from-data provides valuable insights that may ultimately change the way in which we think about language, about how language is learned and about how it is best taught. 

Abstract: Communicative efficiency in human languages and beyond

Dr. Natalia Levshina

Centre for Language Studies

Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Communicative efficiency has been a prominent theme in linguistics and cognitive science. There is plenty of evidence showing that language users try to communicate efficiently, saving time and effort while making sure that they transfer the intended message successfully. Examples of efficient linguistic behaviour include the negative correlation between the length of referential expressions and accessibility of their referents, omission of unimportant or predictable arguments, phonological reduction of predictable units, Zipf’s law of abbreviation, minimization of domains and syntactic dependencies, and many, many others. In my talk I will demonstrate that all these examples boil down to several fundamental principles of efficient communication. I will also discuss how those principles manifest themselves in communicative behaviour beyond natural spoken languages, namely, in natural sign languages, animal communication, constructed languages, non-linguistic symbols and artistic forms. I will argue that despite huge differences, efficiency is a fundamental factor shaping up the communicative practices of living and imaginary beings.

Professor Laurent Prévot is a professor in Language Sciences at Aix Marseille Université at LPL (CNRS & AMU) in France and a junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF) and currently an affiliated researcher at the CEFC Taipei, Academia Sinica thanks to a research leave funded by CNRS. His specialties lie in linguistics, focusing particularly on semantic and pragmatic questions, as well as Natural Language Processing (NLP). Prof. Prévot’s work involves the innovative use of NLP techniques on conversational data, encompassing collaborative efforts across linguistics, neuroscience, and computer science, advancing the understanding of language processing and interaction. 

Professor Hin-Tat Cheung is the Chair Professor at the Department of Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology at Asia University, Taiwan. His expertise spans child language development and various linguistic disorders. A former President of the Linguistics Society of Taiwan, Prof. Cheung has a significant impact on both theoretical and applied linguistics, notably in bilingualism and education. His work often intersects with developmental language research, and has yielded a wealth of publications, particularly focusing on the syntactic abilities in Mandarin-speaking children and the intersection of vocabulary and grammar in developmental language disorders. 

Professor Shu-Kai Hsieh is a Professor at the Graduate Institute of Linguistics at National Taiwan University. His research interests span corpus and computational linguistics, lexical semantics, morphology, as well as linguistic philosophy and cognition and language, exploring the complexities of language, but also intersect with the latest in digital humanities and linguistic technology. His scholarly trajectory has been marked by numerous publications and prominent positions at numerous prestigious institutions. Prof. Hsieh is the founder of Taiwan Olympiad in Linguistics (TOL), and serves as the team leader and head coach of the Taiwanese national teams for International Olympiad in Linguistics (IOL).