This advanced course will focus on how speakers encode and navigate linguistic representations in memory. Linguists are impressed by the rich grammatical details that natural languages follow. There is now abundant evidence that speakers and comprehenders show fine-grained control over these details during moment-by-moment speaking and understanding, but how do they do this? To make matters more interesting, much recent research provides compelling evidence that language users make use of domain-general memory access mechanisms to retrieve words and phrases and to form linguistic dependencies during comprehension. But these domain-general mechanisms, which access information based primarily on content, are not straightforwardly compatible with pervasive constraints that focus primarily on structural configurations. I will discuss the memory mechanisms, the linguistic constraints, the current evidence on how to reconcile them, and key questions for future research.

Course page: http://ling.umd.edu/~colin/wordpress/?page_id=2963