Towards a Grammar of Numbers
When and Where
Speakers
Description
We are glad to invite you for a public lecture by professor José Camacho during his visit to our department.
About the Presentation:
In this lecture, Professor José Camacho argues that addition and multiplication are instantiated linguistically as two distinct structures: coordination for addition and specifier-head quantification for multiplication. Language grammars impose clear constraints on the corresponding cognitive operations. For example, addition and multiplication are not constrained by word order as mathematical operations (20 + 1 = 1 + 20), but they are in language: twenty-one (21) is not the same as one twenty (120). The grammar of numbers provides an elegant and delimited window into the intersection between general-purpose cognition and grammar as well as the internal structure of the noun phrase.
About the Presenter:
Professor of Hispanic & Italian Studies and Director of the School of Literatures, Cultural Studies & Linguistics at the University of Illinois Chicago. He has published six books and dozens of articles and chapters, including in Glossa, Lingua, Linguistic Inquiry, Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, and Second Language Research. He was previously Professor of Spanish & Portuguese and Professor of Linguistics at Rutgers University, where he was Chair of Spanish & Portuguese from 2007 to 2013, and earned his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Southern California.