Feast and Famine Project: Confronting Overabundance and Defectivity in Language

Posted on 31 January 2020

Prof. Dunstan Brown will be part of an international research project with institutions from the UK, Czech Republic and Croatia.

A new major research project in Linguistics ‘Feast and Famine: Confronting Overabundance and Defectivity in Language’ will be lead by Prof. Neil Bermel (The University of Sheffield, School of Languages and Cultures), along with Prof. Dunstan Brown (University of York, Language and Linguistic Science). The aim of the project is to examine the question ‘how people acquire and make sense of 'messy' linguistic data?’ through the languages of central and eastern Europe.

Feast and Famine is due to start in the Spring 2020 and will run for three years. Funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, the project will see a collaboration between seven participating institutes, spanning across the UK, Czech Republic and Croatia.

“It’s an exciting prospect to build and test models of two puzzling phenomena that appear on the surface totally opposed. A key aim is to find out whether there is a common cause.” - Prof. Dunstan Brown, Dept. Language and Linguistic Science

‘Mismatches’ between ‘feast’ (multiple forms) and ‘famine’ (no forms) are found in most of the languages but Central and Eastern European languages, rich in grammatical forms, are a particularly useful testing ground for learning how people can select or fail to find a form that works for them.

Whilst a team at the University of Sheffield will be focusing on adult speakers and how they react when presented with forms and contexts, the team at York will develop computational models to predict the appearance of these ‘mismatches’.

You can read more about the project in The University of Sheffield's news article A feast and famine of grammatical forms