Inaugural speech by Luigi Rizzi: "Complexity of linguistic structures, simplicity of language mechanisms"

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Inaugural speech by Luigi Rizzi, who holds the general Linguistics.

For more than sixty years, researchers have been collaborating worldwide in a vast undertaking to describe human languages within what has been called generative linguistics, with the extraordinary goal of understanding their invariant core and fundamental properties. Drawing on an immense body of linguistic data, they seek to capture the general properties of language and the parameters of variation between languages, but also the ability of speakers to produce new statements, based on a few essential process of language. This field studies the developmental issue: how do children learn their language? Why do they go through systematic phases? - and, of course, a historical angle: how does the structure of languages change over the centuries? These efforts are now leading to a mapping of syntactic structures, which can be based on the strong ties with the cognitive sciences.

Several of these questions will be at the heart of the work of the new General Linguistics Chair at the Collège de France, held by linguist Luigi Rizzi, who worked at the Universities of Geneva and Siena, and who is an eminent member of the British Academy, the Academia Europaea, the Linguistic Society of America, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Born in 1952 in Genoa, Luigi Rizzi is Professor of linguistics at the University of Siena, and Honorary Professor at the University of Geneva. He is Principal Investigator of the project Syntactic Cartography and Locality in Adult Grammar and Language Acquisition (SynCart), funded by an ERC Advanced Grant at the University of Geneva. He studied at Scuola Normale Superiore and at the University of Pisa. He was on the faculty of Departments of Linguistics in European and American Universities: in particular, he was Associate Professor at MIT, Professor at the University of Geneva, Visiting Professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, at UCLA, and at Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris). Rizzi is honorary member of the Linguistic Society of America, Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, member of Academia Europaea, honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

5 November 2020
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Collège de France

Free entry, subject to sanitary regulations (read the College's website).

The speech will be broadcast on the College's website.

Amphithéâtre Marguerite de Navarre, 11 place Marcelin-Berthelot 75005 Paris
2020-11-05 19:00 2020-11-05 20:00 Europe/Paris Inaugural speech by Luigi Rizzi: "Complexity of linguistic structures, simplicity of language mechanisms" Amphithéâtre Marguerite de Navarre, 11 place Marcelin-Berthelot 75005 Paris