LingLunch : Christine Cuskley

Christine Cuskley (Newcastle University)
Information distributions in language: Investigating optimality and adaptation across levels and contexts

This talk will focus on ongoing work from the Constraints on the Adaptiveness of Information in Language (CAIL) project in collaboration with Joel Wallenberg (York) and Rachael Bailes (Newcastle). I'll present work on a broad measure of how we look at information distributions across utterances, and how we've applied this to look at historical syntactic phenomena in English and Icelandic.  Looking ahead, we aim to refine how this theory works across different levels of language: how distributions at the morphological level differ from those at the utterance level and why. Finally, I'll present ongoing work which looks at the role of linguistic planning in manipulating distributions of information.