We have added an Events Calendar to evolutionarylinguistics.org which should hopefully make it easier to keep track of upcoming events and deadlines. We will be keeping the calendar updated with relevant dates concerning all the events listed on this blog.

The calendar can be found here.

-Luke McCrohon

Call deadline: 30 April 2010
Event Dates: 16-18 September 2010
Event Location: Warsaw, Poland
Event URL: http://www.psych.uw.edu.pl/lasc/

The conference emphasizes the biological nature of language, underscoring its coordinative function. The aim of the conference is to 1) show continuity of natural language with other informational systems in biology; 2) show that language arises from and is crucial for human co-action.

Taking an evolutionary and comparative perspective, will draw attention to the kinds of social coordination that arise without (human-like) language, and that contribute to the background used by (and present in) linguistic communication. By so doing, it will be easier to appreciate the qualitatively different types of co-ordination that are specific to humans and language-dependent. The evolutionary perspective will help with coming to view language as a natural phenomenon, continuous with other 'informational' systems at various levels of biological organization, that serve not only vertical (inter-generational) transmission of structure but also horizontal coordination both within and between organisms.

Invited Speakers:
- John Collier, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban
- Terrence Deacon, University of California at Berkeley
- Merlin Donald, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada
- Don Favareau, National University of Singapore
- Carol Fowler, Haskins Laboratories, Yale University and University of Connecticut
- Bruno Galantucci, Yeshiva University
- Don Ross, University of Alabama at Birmingham and University of Cape Town
- Colwyn Trevarthen, University of Edinburgh

Call for Papers

We welcome papers from biology, linguistics, psychology, communication science, philosophy, anthropology in a joint effort to provide a theoretical ground for such a view of language, and - even more importantly - to provide empirical data clarifying the mechanisms of language functioning and emergence.

Call deadline: 15 March 2010
Event dates: 27 - 29 May 2010
Event Location: Montreal, Canada
Event URL: http://www.biolinguistics.uqam.ca

The last decade has seen advances in our understanding of the factors entering into the human language design stemming from linguistic theory, biolinguistics, and biophysics. This workshop brings together participants from a broad array of disciplines to discuss topics that include the connection between linguistic theory and genetics, evolutionary developmental biology and language variation, computer science/information theory and the reduction of uncertainty/complexity.

Reminder: One week left for discounted registrations.

Event Dates: 21 - 30 June 2010
Event Location: Montreal, Canada
Meeting URL: http://www.summer10.isc.uqam.ca/page/inscription.php

The Cognitive Science Institute of the Université du Québec à Montréal is
pleased to launch the program of its third Summer Institute which will bear on The Origins of Language and will take place at UQAM (Montreal, Canada) in June 2010. The program is on the web site of the Summer institute at the following address:

http://www.summer10.isc.uqam.ca/

The program features a wide range of talks from well known researchers across a number of disciplines. The following list provides a small sample of the talks on offer.

• Biological Evolution - David Sloan Wilson
• Co-Evolution of Language and Culture - William Durham
• Animal Communication - Stephanie White
• Brain Evolution - Terrence Deacon
• Origins of Human Communication - Michael Tomasello
• Language as A Culturally Evolving System: From Computer Simulation to The Experiment Lab - Simon Kirby
• How Language Emerges in Situated Embodied Interactions - Luc Steels
• On the Origin of Grammar - Bernd Heine

Luke McCrohon

Event dates: 12-13 July 2010
Event Location: Edinburgh
Meeting URL: http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~monica/LES

"This workshop is concerned with how Darwinian thinking can be applied to the cultural evolution of language. A multidisciplinary collection of contributions form the fields of linguistics, psychology, biology and philosophy will help construct a clearer picture of the state of this field. Additionally, the workshop will hopefully identify empirical ways to solve conflicts and inconsistencies whicn may inform future research and collaborations."

Presenters:

Bill Croft
Tom Griffiths
Alex Mesoudi
Russell Gray
Kenny Smith
Gerhard Jaeger
Monica Tamariz
Simon Kirby

Call for papers deadline: 31st March 2010
Conference dates: 23rd - 26th September 2010
Meeting URL: http://ifa.amu.edu.pl/plm/2010/

Plenary: Nikolaus Ritt (Vienna), “Agents or Vehicles? The role of speakers in directing linguistic evolution”

"The discussion workshop will concentrate on the role of linguistic variation and other factors in competing proposals concerning the mechanisms of language change. The focal event of the session will be the plenary talk by Nikolaus Ritt, followed by six oral presentations. We shall welcome abstracts of presentations dealing with the following topics and questions:

• Why does language change happen at all?
• Does language change have a direction? Are there “historical laws” governing its progress?
• Synchronic variation and diachronic change: how are they interrelated?
• How can we account for the observed tempo of language change and the scale of variation in speech communities?
• Functional explanations of language change, their adequacy and predictive power.
• Evolutionary approaches to language change: replication, competition and selection as explanatory notions.
• Is language a tool designed and controlled by its human users, or does it have a life of its own?
• Should we expect linguistic structures to be rational?"

Considering the topics and the fact that Nikolaus Ritt will be giving the plenary, this promises to be of interesting to anyone researching cultural evolution of language.

We are planning on organizing a semi-weekly Evolution Linguistics discussion/reading group based in Tokyo starting later in the year. Details have not yet been confirmed but it will likely be based at the Hongo Campus of the University of Tokyo and will cover topics ranging from the computational modeling of language emergence to Darwinian theories of language change and everything in between.

We invite anyone interested in attending to register on the events page and we will contact you as details are decided. Participation will be free and open to anyone with an interest in Language Evolution.

-Luke McCrohon

This site is being built to help facilitate the collaborative study of all aspects of Linguistic Evolution. We take this to include not only the study of the biological evolution of the Language faculty, but also the cultural evolution of languages, and the bio-cultural co-evolution of Language as a combined system.

Research in this area cuts across traditional disciplinary boundaries and so will require the collaboration of researchers of from many diverse backgrounds. It is this research we hope to support and so we welcome researchers from all disciplines to to join us on this site. Please feel free to contribute to the comments, on the forums, and join us in person at the events we are planning on organizing.

This site is still is still under development, so please either subscribe to the RSS feed or check back later as we hope to make regular updates over the next few months. In addition to details about the site, we will also be posting information about various events of interest to evolutionary linguistics researchers as we receive them.

-Luke McCrohon