Workshop: Morphological Typology and Linguistic Cognition

The proposed workshop will explore the role of linguistic cognition in shaping morphological patterns within and across languages. The central question of the workshop is whether the cognitive processing of language creates a persistent influence on the typological distributions of morphological structures in the world’s languages. This workshop will explore the hypothesis that morphological structures interact dynamically with lexical processing and storage, with the parameters of morphological typology being partly dependent on the cognitive pathways for processing, storage, and generalization of word structure, and vice versa. We are interested in the nature of this interaction, and seek to determine how far it will take us towards explaining system-level principles of morphological organization and their cross-linguistic distribution. By bringing together different types of linguists – experimentalists, typologists, computational modelers, formalists – we hope to shape a research agenda and push forward progress in this area.