A significant portion of the talks given at the recent Protolang2 conference in Torun, Poland were recorded and are now available to watch online. The Protolang website has links to the videos here.
Might be of interest to those interested in language evolution: The International Max Planck Research School (IMPRS) on Neuroscience of Communication: Function, Structure, and Plasticity is based at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, and the University of Leipzig (Germany). The IMPRS also involves the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, and the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, UK. The graduate programme will start with the Summer Semester 2012 at the University of Leipzig (1 April, 2012). The IMPRS on Neuroscience of Communication: Function, Structure, and Plasticity offers a unique interdisciplinary graduate programme to study the functional, structural, and plastic bases of human communication through an integrative and interdisciplinary approach. Its overriding goal is to train PhD students in multidisciplinary aspects involved in communicative action. Besides behavioural work, the programme draws on elaborate modern imaging techniques, including a 7-Tesla MRI scanner and a 306-channel MEG system. The school invites applications for PhD scholarships. More details here. Call for Commentators: 15 October 2011 Event Date: 15 -18 December 2011 Event Location: Durham, UK Event URL: http://www.dur.ac.uk/conference.booking/details/?id=97 Grammar is universal in human populations, pathologies aside. A theory of grammar should thus be a universal theory in this sense. Yet it is widely contended today that it need not be the theory of Universal Grammar (UG), in the sense of its early generative formulations, which have taken UG to be a linguistically specific and species-specific biological endowment consisting of functionally arbitrary formal rules. Theories of universal grammar have also been formulated in a number of different ways in the past, with far from identical underlying axiomatic assumptions. Furthermore, the modern theory of UG itself is currently undergoing a significant reformulation, following the development of Minimalism. This conference aims to provide a forum for assessing and (re-)directing the course that research on universal grammar and the biological foundations of language should take over the coming years and decades, bringing together linguists, psychologists, philosophers, and biologists. Call for Commentators: We hope to offer a conference fee waiver plus financial help towards accommodation and/or travel costs to all commentators. The call for commentators will be released in August. Event Date: March 12 2012 Event Location: Kyoto, Japan Event URL: http://www.bioling.jp/english/events/ As yet details are limited, but i has been announced that there will be a one day biolinguistics conference the day before the Evolang9 conference in Kyoto, Japan next year. Kyoto Conference on Biolinguistics - The Human Language Faculty: Its Design, Development and Evolution - March 12, 2012, Kyoto Invited Speakers: Noam Chomsky Cedric Boeckx Charles Yang Naoki Fukui For more information to be provided in the near future, please visit http://www.bioling.jp/english/events/ (English) http://www.bioling.jp/events/ (Japanese) This may be of interest to people. "Biologist Mark Pagel shares an intriguing theory about why humans evolved our complex system of language. He suggests that language is a piece of "social technology" that allowed early human tribes to access a powerful new tool: cooperation." Video Url: http://www.ted.com/talks/mark_pagel_how_language_transformed_humanity.html Sorry for the late update on this, it is passed the submission deadline, but this may still be of interest to people in the area. Event Dates: 16-18 September 2011 Event Location: Shanghai, China Event URL: http://comonca.org.cn/ee/ee-en.htm Along with the developments in the fields of anthropology in East Asia, many data and much knowledge have been accumulated recently in molecular anthropology and linguistic anthropology, shedding lights on the origin and diversification of the human populations in the Far East. Communications among the subfields are eagerly required to share the knowledge and draw more detailed conclusions on the human population histories. Since the first International Meeting of Linguistic Evolution and Genetic Evolution was hold in 2005 successfully, the second meeting will be necessary to discuss the new data and new results. Therefore, we sincerely invite you to the meeting to be hold in this September in Shanghai. Language: Chinese, English Program: 1) Phylogeny of Sino-Tibetan; 2) Phylogeny of Daic and Austronesian; 3) Linguistics and genetics of the North Asians and Southeast Asians; 4) Computation and Statistics Methods. Fields including: Evolutionary Linguistics, Molecular Anthropology, Archaeological Anthropology, Forensic Anthropology, Genetic Structure of World Populations. Several famous linguists and geneticists will be invited for plenary lectures. The organizing committee of Evolang9 to be held next March in Kyoto, Japan, have announced the preliminary list of Plenary Speakers. Plenary Speakers:
More details will be announced as they become available at kyoto.evolang.org Call deadline: 15 June 2011 Event Dates: 19-21 September 2011 Event Location: Torun, Poland Event URL: http://www.protolang.umk.pl/ In response to a number of requests submission deadline has been extended to 15th June 2011. Protolang is a biennial conference organised by the Department of English, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Torun. One of the primary goals of this conference is bringing together researchers representing a variety of areas in order to gain a multidisciplinary perspective on the range of currently available evidence relevant to early language evolution. The focus of the conference is on the early stages of the emergence of symbolic, language-like communication in hominids. The conference will reflect the inherently interdisciplinary nature of research into the evolution of language. We invite papers from a wide range of subjects related to language evolution. Keynote Speakers: John Gowlett (University of Liverpool; Lucy to Language British Academy Project) - "Language Beginnings – a view from the early archaeological record" Juliane Kaminski (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology) - "Do dogs get the point" Adam Kendon (Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, University of Pennsylvania)- "An evolutionary approach to explaining why patterned visible bodily action commonly occurs when people speak" Katie Slocombe (Department of Psychology, University of York) "Vocal communication in chimpanzees" Call deadline: 15 May 2011 Event Dates: 8 August 2011 Event Location: Paris, France Event URL: http://www.fcg-net.org/events/AAALE_2011.html This workshop brings together researchers that are attempting to simulate the emergence and cultural evolution of communication systems with properties similar to those found in human natural languages. The workshop focuses in particular on experiments that use physically embodied humanoid robots and target communication systems that exhibit grammatical structure and involve rich grounded conceptualizations of the world co-evolving with language. A typical example would be an experiment in which autonomous robots evolve a spatial language to express spatial relations and perspective reversal or an experiment in which a case grammar emerges for expressing the role of participants in events, or an experiment in which a system of determiners arises to refer to sets of objects in the shared context of two situated communicating agents. Call for Contributions Contributions are solicited on all aspects of this grand challenge. They should preferably be based on mechanisms that have been effectively implemented and demonstrated to work on real robots. Although aspects of perception and motor control are obviously very relevant to evolve grounded language, the workshop will primarily focus on issues related to conceptualization and grammar, and to models of cultural evolution that are effective for explaining the complexity of human languages. Experiments that simulate or relate to phenomena observed in human language evolution are particularly encouraged. Posters may include robot videos and demonstrations with physical robots are welcome. More specifically, submissions are solicited on the following topics: - Systems for conceptualization, grounded in sensori-motor experience - Co-evolution of category formation and lexicon formation - Computational formalisms supporting emergent grammar - Factors driving the cultural emergence of grammatical systems - Mechanisms for conceptual and linguistic alignment - Origins and stabilization of language strategies - Competition and coordination between language strategies - Autonomous evolution of scripts for language games - Semiotic dynamics of embodied agents - Origins of speech systems These topics should as much as possible be grounded in case studies. Call deadline: 10 April 2011 Event Dates: 5-8 January 2012 Event Location: Portland, OR, USA Event URL: http://linguistlist.org/issues/22/22-1259.html Call for papers: In conjunction with the LSA Special Interest Group on Biolinguistics, we invite the submission of abstracts for a proposed Workshop on Biolinguistics at the 2012 LSA Annual Meeting. We invite abstracts on any aspect of the biolinguistic enterprise, keeping in mind that the Special Interest Group on Biolinguistics was founded in part to 'contribute to the field by helping to identify what makes biolinguistics 'bio' (and 'linguistic'), initiate discussions on how it differs from previous models of generative grammar (and how it doesn't), debate whether generative grammar is actually a prerequisite… and so on.' Abstracts should be between 200-500 words and need not be anonymous. (The LSA reviews Workshop proposals non-anonymously.) Please, no more than one single-authored and one joint-authored abstract per person. All participants are required to be LSA members. However, anyone may submit an abstract, so long as they join the LSA if they ultimately present. Please send abstracts, preferably in PDF format, to: Kleanthes Grohmann at kleanthi(at)ucy.ac.cy Bridget Samuels at bridget(at)umd.edu | About us:
This page is maintained by: ArchivesDecember 2011 CategoriesAll |
RSS Feed