The CEU Department of Philosophy cordially invites you to a talk
(as part of its Departmental Colloquium series)
by
Jakub Čapek (Charles University, Prague)
on
`Merleau-Ponty and his „primacy of perception“ thesis`
Tuesday, 12 February, 2013, 5.30 PM, Zrinyi 14, Room 412
ABSTRACT
In Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, perception is not just a possible
philosophical issue. The analysis of perception largely determines the
way other philosophical issues, such as consciousness, time, language or
ideal objects, should be approached. Merleau-Ponty repeatedly affirms
the priority of perceiving, as, for instance, in his 1946 lecture The
Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences or in his
masterpiece Phenomenology of Perception (1945), where he regards
perception as our “primordial knowledge” of the real. In my work on
Merleau-Ponty, I do two things: (1.) I try to state as clearly as
possible, what meaning the primacy of perception has, and (2.) what
philosophical consequences it implies.
In my lecture, I proceed in three steps. Since the thesis of the primacy
of perception – in all its possible meanings – presupposes a certain
idea of what perception is, I briefly outline Merleau-Ponty’s theory of
perception. Secondly, I come back to the primacy of perception thesis. I
propose to distinguish its three possible meanings. This enables us to
formulate our question more precisely. Thirdly, I focus on one area of
application of Merleau-Ponty’s fundamental thesis, viz. on his analysis
of consciousness. I will interpret his statement: “All consciousness is,
in some measure, perceptual consciousness.”
Kedves Kollégák
Levelünkben olvashatják a Nyelvtudományi Intézet februári programját.
Előadásainkra minden érdeklődőt szeretettel várunk!
Sipos Mária
tud. titkár
*
2013. február 12. kedd 11.00 óra
Rácz Péter
Gyakoriság és szaliencia a szociolingvisztikában
The aim of this talk is to provide a working definition for the widely used
concept of sociolinguistic salience. This definition relies on the
connection between the salience of a sociolinguistic variable and the
variable's frequency, namely, the transitional probabilities of the
segmental realisations of the variable across idiolects or dialects. The
talk surveys the notion of salience as used in linguistics, particularly in
studies of linguistic variation, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics.
It then goes on to provide an operationalisation of the concept in
sociolinguistics, along with a methodology to establish empirically
testable boundaries for it. It is also shown how a frequency-based
definition of sociolinguistic salience contributes a lot to rich-memory
language modelling, which is exactly the type of framework assumed for most
studies of frequency effects on language structure.
*
2013. február 19. kedd 11.00 óra
Prof. Daniel McIntyre
(University of Huddersfield)
Read all about it! Reporting the news in Early Modern English
In this paper I report on a corpus-based project investigating the
presentation of speech, writing and thought in Early Modern English prose
fiction and news writing. The aim of the project is to determine how
discourse presentation develops over time. To study this we have built and
annotated a small corpus of Early Modern English using the model of speech,
writing and thought presentation outlined in Semino and Short (2004). We
are thus able to compare our findings against those of Semino and Short for
Present Day English writing. In this talk I will discuss the construction
of the corpus, tagging issues, and what the quantitative results suggest
about news reporting techniques in the Early Modern period.
*
2013. február 26. kedd 14.00 óra
Fiatal PhD-sok előadásai a Nyelvtudományi Intézetben
Kardos Éva
Telic marking in Hungarian
It is commonly assumed in the literature that the telicity of verbal
predicates is the outcome of the cumulative effects of various components
of the discourse (e.g. the verb heading the predicate, its arguments
including scalar arguments (see Hay et al. 1999, Kennedy and McNally 2005,
and Kennedy and Levin 2008), and contextual clues), which can all
contribute some meaning component that is necessary to describe a situation
that has an inherent endpoint. In this talk I show that when examined from
a cross-linguistic perspective, the elements that one must consider in the
calculation of telicity differ as far as their aspectual "weight" is
concerned. Specifically, I present arguments for the idea that in Hungarian
we can identify specific discourse components such as certain verbal
particles and resultative XPs that are directly responsible for the
telicity of a given predicate (hence the term 'telic marking') by virtue of
placing a bound on the denoted event, something that is not observable in
English, for instance. In the latter, I show that verbal particles and
resultative XPs provide the scale of the predicate (and not the event) with
a bound and thus they are unable to guarantee telicity by themselves.
In my analysis, which is based on Kardos (2012), I take a model-theoretic
approach to the characterization of telicity in Hungarian. More
specifically, I adopt Beavers's (2012) figure-path relations model, which
is an extension of Krifka's (1998) theory of aspect. I first discuss this
model, the main innovation of which lies in the fact that it assumes
mutually-constraining ternary homomorphic relations between the part
structure of two incremental theme arguments (i.e. the figure, which
undergoes some kind of change, and the path traversed during the event) and
the part structure of the event argument and that it provides a novel
definition of telicity, which is less strict than the one proposed by
Krifka (1998). After a brief description of the theoretical background, I
use mainly degree achievements like *fel-melegszik *'PRT-warm' and
*le-hűl *'PRT-cool'
to illustrate event bounding as carried out by, for instance, verbal
particles in Hungarian. I further assume that event-bounding constituents
introduce event maximalization (cf. Filip and Rothstein 2006 and Filip
2008) into the predicate, thereby imposing specific constraints on the
interpretive properties of the arguments that determine the aspectual
make-up of the predicate. Since event maximalization has the crucial effect
that the verbal predicate has quantized reference, it follows that the
telic interpretation of such predicates arises due to a stronger notion
(i.e. quantized reference) than the telic interpretation of the English
counterparts of these predicates, where quantized reference is a sufficient
but not necessary condition for telicity to arise.
*References *
Beavers, John. (2012). Lexical aspect and multiple incremental themes. In
V. Demonte & L. McNally (Eds.), *Telicity and change of state in natural
language: implications for event structure*. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Filip, Hana. (2008). Events and maximalization. In S. Rothstein (Ed.),
*Theoretical
and crosslinguistic approaches to the semantics of aspect *(pp. 217-256).
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Filip, Hana and Susan Rothstein. (2006). Telicity as a semantic parameter.
In J. Lavine, S. Franks, H. Filip, & M. Tasseva-Kurktchieva (Eds.), *Formal
Approaches to Slavic Linguistics (FASL) XIV *(pp. 139-156). Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Slavic Publications. 2
Hay, Jennifer, Christopher Kennedy, and Beth Levin. (1999). Scalar
structure underlies telicity in degree achievements. In T. Matthews & D.
Strolovich (Eds.), *SALT IX *(pp. 127-144). Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.
Kardos, Éva. (2012). Toward a scalar semantic analysis of telicity in
Hungarian. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Debrecen,
Debrecen.
Kennedy, Christopher and Louise McNally. (2005). Scale structure, degree
modification, and the semantics of gradable predicates. *Language, 81*,
345-381.
Kennedy, Christopher and Beth Levin. (2008). Measure of change: the
adjectival core of degree achievements. In L. McNally & C. Kennedy
(Eds.), *Adjectives
and adverbs: syntax, semantics and discourse *(pp. 156-182). Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Krifka, Manfred. (1998). The origins of telicity. In S. Rothstein
(Ed.), *Events
and Grammar *(pp. 197-235)*. *Dordrecht: Kluwer.
*
Az előadások helyszíne:
MTA Nyelvtudományi Intézet
1068 Budapest, Benczúr u. 33.
földszinti előadóterem
The CEU Department of Philosophy cordially invites you to a talk
(as part of its Departmental Colloquium series)
by
Pierre Jacob (Institut Jean Nicod, Paris / CEU)
on
`A puzzle about belief-ascription`
Tuesday, 5 February, 2013, 5.30 PM, Zrinyi 14, Room 412
ABSTRACT
(1) Much developmental evidence based on the so-called “standard or
elicited false belief task” shows that when asked to predict where an
agent with a false belief about an object’s location will look for it,
children who know the location of the object fail until they are well
into their fifth year. (2) However, several more recent experiments
based on different paradigms, including the violation-of-expectation
paradigm, anticipatory looking, helping and referential communication,
also show that preverbal human infants seem to reliably represent an
agent’s false beliefs. The puzzle is: how to reconcile (1) and (2)?
Until recently there were two main strategies for solving the puzzle.
One strategy is to take the data on preverbal human infants at face
value and show why it is so hard for 3-year-olds to pass the standard
false belief task. The other strategy is to offer low-level explanations
for the data on preverbal human infants and deny that they are able to
represent another’s false beliefs. A third strategy has recently
emerged, based on a “two-systems” approach to belief-ascription. On
behalf of the first strategy, I will argue that there is decisive
evidence against the second strategy and that it is hard for the third
strategy to get off the ground.
*Submission deadline is extended until
*
*February 11, 2013.*
* *
*V. Dubrovnik Conference on Cognitive Science - May 16-19, 2013.*
* *
*SLEEP, NEURAL OSCILLATIONS AND COGNITION***
The Central European Cognitive Science Association (CECOG) is pleased to
announce the V. Dubrovnik Conference on Cognitive Science (DuCog) to be
held in the historical town of Dubrovnik, Croatia, on May 16-19, 2013.
*DuCog *is a small-medium size annual conference with up to 100
participants. Every year a specific topic is covered by keynote speakers
and invited speakers. The focus of the conference this year is* sleep,
neural oscillations and cognition*.
*Keynote Speakers*
*
*
* **György Buzsáki*
New York University, USA**
* *
* *
*Peter Achermann*
University of Zürich, Switzerland
* **
*
*Philippe Peigneux*
Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
*Victor Spoormaker*
Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, Germany
*
*
* *
*
*
*Invited speakers*
* *
*
*
*Marcello Massimini*
University of Milan, Italy
* *
*Ursula Voss*
Bonn University, Germany
* *
*Péter Simor*
Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary
*Gareth Gaskell*
University of York, UK
*Péter Halász*
Péter Pázmány Catholic University, Hungary
* *
*Susanne Diekelmann*
University of Lübeck, Germany
*Róbert Bódizs*
Semmelweis University, Hungary
* *
*Submission is open until February 11, 2013.*
* *
*Submit a poster abstract!*
* *
*For further information visit the conference website at **
http://www.cecog.eu/ducog/page_invitation.php
*
*Please note that the website has not been updated yet!*