“The Secret Lives of Words ”
Michael Putnam, Ph.D.
Professor, German and Linguistics
Director, Program in Linguistics
Associate Director, Center for Language Science
Friday, September 29, 9:00–10:30 a.m. EDT
Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library
Words are a fairly intuitive construct in everyday language. Although both adults and children can readily identify what a word is (or what they perceive a word to be), it is actually quite difficult to describe the linguistic properties of 'words'. In this talk, we'll examine some of the key properties of 'words', showing that their internal structure is far more complex than commonly assumed. A second aim of this talk is to demonstrate how these theoretical hypotheses concerning the structure of words (i.e., morphology) can successfully be integrated into other areas of research in linguistics (i.e., corpus linguistics) and language science (i.e., behavior and experimental methods).