LEC meeting 9th April: Talk by Mark Atkinson

Mark Atkinson will give a talk on the work he’s carried out in the first 6 months of his PhD:  ”Social complexity effects on linguistic complexity: an experimental investigation into how population structure influences the structural properties of an artificial language”. Tuesday 9th April, 11am, DSB 1.17, abstract below.

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Mark Atkinson

Social complexity effects on linguistic complexity: an experimental investigation into how population structure influences the structural properties of an artificial language.

While there have long been claims about the influence of a language?s environment on its lexis and phoneme inventory, only recently have there been concentrated attempts to identify how social complexity may systematically influence the properties of linguistic structure.

In this talk, I will discuss the various claims and empirical evidence which connect communicative structure to social structure, before examining the proposed mechanisms by which different degrees of social complexity can influence grammatical characteristics. I will then present the results of my recent experimental work investigating the effect of different population structures on artificial languages, before considering the further insights provided by computer modelling of the interactions of the participants. Finally, I will look at some of the theoretical and methodological issues I have encountered during this work and the implications for research of this kind, before considering the possibilities for future study.