Agata Marcante

Agata Marcante, MSc

PhD Student

Language, ACQuisition, DIVersity Lab

Distributional Linguistics Lab

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What is unique about human communication? How do we learn languages? How can language models (LMs) help us investigate questions regarding the evolution and the acquisition of language?
These broad questions concerning the faculty of language might appear weakly related and yet they all underlie my PhD project here at the University of Zurich.
Under the supervision of Balthasar Bickel, Rico Sennrich and Sabine Stoll, I will investigate the dynamics of syntactic (anti-)locality in a maximally diverse cohort of languages. Using both syntactic formalisms and language models to measure locality, we shall probe the predictions of different hypotheses to obtain an understating of which ultimate mechanisms better explain the distribution of (anti-) locality in the data. We shall test these hypotheses by looking at the dynamics of locality not only across language, but also across use setting (adult vs child directed speech, conversational or not), and across time (diachronically).
Under which circumstances and for which purpose is anti-locality functional? Which evolutionary pressures might have led to this organisation and usage of language? We shall attempt to answer these questions.
With a background in developmental linguistics and NLP, and an appetite for language evolution, I am interested in using computational linguistics techniques to investigate questions concerning developmental and evolutionary aspects of language.

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