Shota Momma (UMass Linguistics) will give a presentation in Cognitive brown bag Weds. 10/30 at noon in Tobin 521B. Title and abstract are below. All are welcome!

Title: How awful are verb-final sentences (for speakers)?

Abstract: Mark Twain, in his humorous essay titled ‘The Awful German Language’ (1880), complained about the fact that speakers of some language put arguably the most important elements of sentences (verbs) last. His intuition was based on the observation that the structure and the meaning of a sentence often depends a lot on the verb of that sentence. If the structure and the meaning of a sentence depends a lot on the verb, do speakers plan the last word first when producing a verb-final sentence? This intuitive question is tightly associated with the problems of sequential planning and working memory in cognitive psychology and the problem of how argument-verb relations are realized in speaking in (psycho-)linguistics. In this talk, I will aim to address when and why speakers plan verbs when producing verb-final sentences in Japanese and English, discussing the mechanisms of sentence production in relation to working memory, sequential planning, and linguistic representations.