Locality in Language the Focus of Inaugural Lecture

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The presentation of an inaugural lecture is a significant milestone in an academic’s career, and so it was for Professor Jochen Zeller, a Professor of Linguistics within UKZN’s School of Arts when he spoke on: Locality in Language.

Zeller’s areas of research include the syntax of natural language; African languages (especially Bantu); language in South Africa; and language and cognition.

‘The problem with my kind of linguistics is that it is not easy to explain,’ said Zeller. ‘People don’t think of language as something that can be studied scientifically. They don’t conceive of language as a complex mental knowledge system, which is characterised by underlying rules and principles that can be formally defined, and about which we can formulate hypotheses that make testable predictions.’

However, this is exactly the kind of work he does. Working mainly in an area of linguistics called syntax, in his lecture he chose to focus on one important syntactic principle, Locality, which has relevance for many phenomena in many different languages, and which has also played an important role in his research. He used this Locality principle to show how syntacticians think and reason about language, what research methods they use, and how they develop theoretical ideas based on linguistic data from different languages.

Zeller’s lecture dealt with human language, focusing on some of its properties that are syntactic in nature, ie constituent structure, a property called displacement, productivity and recursion.

Zeller explained and explored the Locality principle that restricts syntactic operations, highlighting the significance of cross-linguistic research, and showing how the interaction of two different versions of Locality, explains findings from an experimental syntax study he recently conducted.

In conclusion Zeller said, ‘I hope to have shown that syntactic analysis leads to hypotheses about (possibly universal) computational properties of human language and that studying syntax reveals fundamental properties of the mental knowledge system we call “language”.

‘I also hope to have shown that syntax presents a window into the human mind and that syntacticians use different (quantitative and qualitative) methods to answer different research questions,’ he added.

Words: Jennene Naidu

Photograph: Supplied