University of Göttingen: Opening ceremony with Noam Chomsky

On the occasion of its opening, the Research Training Group (RTG) “Form-meaning mismatches” of the University of Göttingen invites to a public lecture by the US-American linguist Professor Noam Chomsky from the University of Arizona. On Tuesday, 14 September 2021, the internationally renowned linguist will speak about the current state of minimalism in linguistic theorizing. The event will be held in English and begins at 19:30 with a welcoming address by Professor Bernhard Brümmer, Vice President for Research at the University of Göttingen, and an introduction by GRK spokesperson Professor Hedde Zeijlstra, as well as the presentation of three doctoral projects. Chomskys lecture starts at 20:30. The event will be broadcast online via Zoom. The lecture will also be broadcast via Livestream on YouTube and simultaneously translated into German Sign Language (DGS), also on YouTube.



The RTG started in early September. In the first cohort, 24 doctoral candidates will receive structured scientific training in linguistics. The German Research Foundation is supporting the RTG for four and a half years with around five million euros. The researchers are working on the systematic assignment of form and meaning in natural languages. They are also investigating how language is acquired and cognitively processed, how language has developed historically, and how languages can vary. The Minimalist Program that Chomsky will discuss in its lecture aims at tracing all the central properties of human language and linguistic variation back to a single small grammatical derivational system.