Dr. Stephanie Durrleman, University of Geneva, Switzerland
Date: November 6, 2017
Location/Time of talk: BOUS 160, 5pm
Title of talk: Thinking about thoughts: The role of language
Dr. Durrleman is a linguist who currently co-directs a Swiss National Scientific Project entitled ‘The Acquisition of Jamaican Creole: A corpus-based study of early parameter-setting’ (with Professors Ur Shlonsky and Luigi Rizzi). Her monograph: ‘The Syntax of Jamaican Creole: A Cartographic Perspective’ (Benjamins 2008) is the first cartographic analysis of a Creole language. She is also more generally interested in contact languages and was co-editor of the book ‘Structure and Variation in Language Contact’ (Benjamins 2006). She has recently turned her attention to language pathology and more specifically to syntactic development in individuals with autism. This theme, on which she has collaboratively presented and published, is now the focus of her investigations, thanks to a 3-year Swiss National Scientific Research award for her project ‘Syntax in Autism’.