Title: Language Typology and its Impact on Language Learning

Speaker: Prof. Wolfgang Ulrich Dressler, Professor, University of Vienna, Austria

Time & Date: 17:00 PM., 16 December 2020

Language: English

Venue:  ZOOM (Join Zoom Meeting: Meeting ID: 650 9823 6576  Passcode: 237477)

Abstract

This conference discusses topics of general linguistics on the basis of examples drawn from different language families and from different areas of the world, according to the approach of linguistic typology. It especially focuses on morphology, which is a linguistic area of little importance in Chinese, but, with typological variations, of great importance in most foreign languages commonly studied in China. Within this area, there is a second focus on research in which the speaker and his research associates have been involved themselves. This comprises typological criteria wich are both important for the theory of language typology and for its impact on the ease of language acquisition, where 1. first language acquisition, 2. second language acquisition and 3. foreign language acquisition must be distinguished. The conference combines an updated perspective on linguistic typology with the author’s original research on morphology, language acquisition and language learning.

About the guest

Wolfgang U. Dressler (University of Vienna, Austria) is a world-renowned linguist, with teaching and research appointments in different universities of Europe and of America and hundreds of publications on different fields of linguistics, ranging from historical linguistics and Indio-European studies to general linguistics and typology. His main research interests reside in phonology, morphology, semiotics, text linguistics, aphasia, and child language acquisition. He is a co-founder of the theory of ‘Natural Morphology’, which investigates the principles of a ‘natural’ grammatical system as well the deviations from that – cf. his pioneering monograph Morphology (1985). He is also interested in endangered languages and language death, as can be seen from his fieldwork on Breton (a Celtic language, now in decay, spoken in Brittany, France). There is hardly a linguistic topic that Wolfgang U. Dressler left untouched, and his views have largely contributed to the theoretical development of linguistics as a scientific discipline.