Elizabeth Wonnacott (BA postdoc in Experimental Psychology at Oxford) is in town next week, she is giving a talk on “Constraining generalisation in artificial language learning“, Thursday 9th June, 11am, DSB 1.17. She’ll also be around Friday, let Kenny know if you’d like to meet with her while she’s here.
On Tuesday 7th June from 11-12.30 in room 1.17 DSB, Erin Brown will give a talk on her thesis work:
Where do symbols come from?
A central issue in language origins is the emergence of symbolic communication. Recognizing the problems associated with establishing symbolic reference, many authors have proposed that nonarbitrary communication must have preceded symbolic communication, with nonarbitrary forms serving to ground arbitrary ones. Precisely how this bootstrapping of symbols took place continues to be debated, and questions remain regarding how meaning came to be represented in arbitrary forms and in which modality symbols first arose. Using semiotic theory, I identify two factors underlying the establishment of symbolic representation and examine research in experimental semiotics, new signed languages and computational modeling with these concepts in mind. I will discuss how these findings, together with a consideration of the particular qualities of human communication, can inform our understanding of the development of symbols in language evolution.
Dan Yurovsky (PhD student in the Cognitive Development Lab in Indiana, working with Chen Yu & Linda Smith) is visiting next week and will be giving the LEC talk: “Learning words in the lab and in the world: the role of statistical information”, Tuesday 31st May, 11am, DSB 1.17. He’s here Monday to Thursday, so if you’d like to meet with him at some point email Kenny Smith and he’ll set something up.
Tommorow’s LEC talk will be given by Anna Martowicz, “The last step in the evolution of modern language – some findings and thoughts”, abstract below. Tuesday 24th, 11am, DSB 1.17
The last step in the evolution of modern language – some findings and thoughts
In this talk I summarize the findings of my cross-linguistic PhD study on the encoding of four circumstantial relations between states of affairs: anteriority, causality, purpose and conditionality. The items used as the exponents of these relations (including but not limited to the category of subordinators) are missing from Bickerton’s (1990) protolanguage. Also according to Jackendoff (1999), the emergence of clause linkers, along with other “symbols that explicitly encode abstract semantic relationships”, is the last step in the evolution of modern language. This is supported by the evidence from grammaticalization studies which strongly suggest that of all the grammatical categories, clause linking devices developed as one of the last groups (Heine and Kuteva 2007). However, modern languages differ significantly as to the number and types of the clause-linkers they have at their disposal. This fact is usually explained by pointing at certain socio-linguistic factors influencing language structure (most commonly – the presence and length of written tradition). Testing the hypothesis I present the results of correlation analyses between a number of socio-cultural factors and the degree of grammaticalization, lexicalization and explicitness of clause-linking devices in the 84 languages in my world-wide sample. I argue that in order to explain the complex picture emerging from the study we also need to consider geographic patterns of distribution of the abovementioned degrees, pragmatic relevance and cognitive characteristics of the analyzed relations.
Sean will be giving a talk this week about a paper he’s working on with James Winters on the relationship between social structure and language structure. As he puts it:
“Expect to hear about:
- The effect of second language learners on morphological complexity
- Degeneracy and variation
- Why the only other Evolutionary theory of Bilingualism is Wrong
- The link between Acacia trees, Keynote’s flame transition and the Church of Scotland
We welcome your criticisms, awe and mockery.”
Room: 1.17 DSB, 11-12.30, Tuesday May 3rd.
Simon
Our next LEC talk, on Tuesday 12th April in 1.17 DSB from 11:00-12:30, will be from Jim Hurford. He will be talking about: Reconciling linguistic jerks and biological creeps.
We will be going to Nile Valley for lunch afterwards (their proper lunch menu is great, varied and cheap!).
Hope to see you all there,
Simon
This coming Tuesday 5th at 11-12.30, David White will give us a talk on the ideas that have developed during the first months of his PhD. The title is: Do language evolution and language change produce waste?
Now teaching is over, we can move back into our usual room: 1.17, Dugald Stewart Building.
See you there!
Simon
Expressive Communication and the Origins of Meaning: Must We ‘Go Gricean’?
Dorit Bar-On, UNC-Chapel Hill
For my public Inaugural Lecture, I will be trying to give a broad accessible summary of the importance of some of the recent research in the LEC. There will be a reception with drinks and canapes afterwards to celebrate – all welcome!
22nd March 5.15pm, Appleton Tower, Lecture Theatre 5
But where does this unique trait come from? How did it evolve? Why are we the only species that has it? The quest to answer these questions starts in the familiar world of biological evolution. Perhaps we have evolved an “organ” for language, just like other animals have their own specialised biological apparatus. However there is something very peculiar about language that makes such simple answers suspect. In recent years, work pioneered in Edinburgh has demonstrated that language itself is a new kind of evolutionary system – one we are only just beginning to understand.
In this talk, I will survey the progress made in making sense of this system and what it means for our understanding of language and of ourselves. Along the way we will see how we can study language evolution in the laboratory; what birds and foxes might tell us; and why culture might be changing the way we evolve.