Departmental Seminar on 23 March 2009

Title: Form and Function in Functional Linguistics
Speaker: Professor Masayoshi Shibatani (Department of Linguistics, Rice University)
Date: March 23, 2009 (Monday)
Time: 4:30pm - 6:00pm
Venue: AG 507, Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Abstract:

Functionalism in linguistics has a long and venerable history. This talk, by reviewing some predecessors' insights into the linguistic form-function correlation, argues that functional linguists have not been functional enough for still being preoccupied by form. A principle more abstract than Haiman's (1983) influential form-based iconicity principle is offered as a way of accounting for a wide-ranging pattern of form-function correlation across different domains of grammar. Also considered are the closely-related questions of how human cognition is reflected in the form-function correlation and how language use affects the form of language.

About the speaker:

Masayoshi "Matt" Shibatani is the Deedee McMurtry Professor of Humanities and Professor and former Chair in the Linguistics Department at Rice University in Houston, Texas, U.S.A. He received both his B.A. and Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of California at Berkeley. He specializes in language typology, syntax, linguistic theory, Japanese and Austronesian linguistics. He has worked on Japanese, Ainu, Korean, Cebuano (Philippine), Indonesian, and Balinese. Currently he is engaged in fieldwork in eastern Indonesia working on both Western and Central-Eastern Malayo-Polynesian languages under the auspices of the US National Science Foundation. His publicartions include authored books Nihongo-no Bunseki (Taishukan-shoten 1978) and The Languages of Japan (Cambridge University Press 1990), and edited books Approaches to Language Typology (1995), Grammatical Constructions: Form and Meaning (1996), both from Clarendon Oxford University Press, and The Grammar of Causation and Interpersonal Manipulation (2002) as well as Syntactic Complexity (2009) both from John Benjamins. After teaching in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Southern California for several years, Professor Shibatani returned to Japan and was a member of the Faculty of Letters at Kobe University for 23.5 years before joining the Rice faculty in January 2002. While in Japan he served as the President of the Linguistic Society of Japan (1977-2000). He has been a visiting professor at UCLA, University of Illinois, University of California, Santa Barbara, University of Hawaii, La Trobe University (Melbourne), SOAS (London), and Keimyung University (Taegue, Korea). He was a Fellow at the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology at the Australian National University (1998-1999) and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California (2000-2001), and also a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at La Trobe University in Australia (2008-2009). He has recently been elected a Christensen Fellow of St. Catherine’s College, Oxford University, where he will spend the Trinity Term, 2009. Professor Shibatani is currently visiting Hong Kong as the 2009 speaker of the Distinguished Scholars Lecture Series in Linguistics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.