Call deadline: 1 September 2012
Event Dates: 8-12 November 2012
Event Location: Peking, China 
Event URL: http://ccl.pku.edu.cn/event/ciel/LatestEng.html

The Conference in Evolutionary Linguistics, 2012, will be held by the Center for Chinese linguistics, Peking University, on November 8-12, 2012. Nov. 8 is the registration day.

With its foundation in Darwinian theory, evolutionary linguistics references two evolutionary forces, biological and social, to tackle the job of explaining two fundamental questions, the emergence and development of language. With interdisciplinary cooperation, evolutionary linguistics interacts with anthropology, biology, and archeology. Recently evolutionary linguistics has been making important advancements. The 9th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (Evolang IX) was successfully held in Kyoto, Japan. Diversified languages in China with rich orthographic traditions and long histories of various forms of transcription exist in a complex realm of linguistic contact. Thus, further studies highlighting these phenomena will make new contributions to evolutionary linguistics, both in breadth and depth. Therefore, there is much anticipation of enhancing international interaction and interdisciplinary cooperation via this conference. The earlier ones in Guangzhou, Tianjin, and Shanghai have been held in the same spirit.

Conference topics may include the following: 1. Language as a complex adaptive system; 2. Language and population evolution in China; 3. Language evolution in China and archeological evidence; 4. Vertical and horizontal transmission of language; 5. Language and the brain. A special handling of the evolution and development of Miao-Yao languages will also be organized.

We sincerely welcome all interested scholars to attend! Please send abstracts (800-1,000 words) to elpku2012@163.com in doc or pdf format before September 1, 2012. Formal invitations will be sent out no later than September 10, 2012. The conference will be conducted in Putonghua (Mandarin Chinese) or English. Conference papers will be edited for publishing in a special issue of the Journal of Chinese Linguistics or Essays on Linguistics.

Call deadline: 1 September 2012
Event Dates: 22-27 July 2013
Event Location: Geneva, Switzerland 
Event URL: http://www.cil19.org/en/sessions/session-2/

This parallel session at the International Conference of Linguistics will be structured around five major issues that arise in the domain of the evolution of language. Abstracts are solicited which address one or more of the following issues: 

1. The relevance of the distinction between I-language and E-languages for the question of language evolution. Chomsky introduced a major distinction between I-language (the inner, psychological, knowledge of grammar) and E-languages (the public languages, such as English, French, Italian, Japanese, etc.). E-languages are public by contrast with I-language, which is private. This may mean that there are not one, but two evolutionary stories to be told, one relevant to the evolution of I-language and one relevant to the evolution of E-languages. Additionally, the evolutionary processes involved might be different, e.g., one could be biological while the other one could be cultural. However, the distinction between I-language and E-languages has been largely ignored in the literature on language evolution. 

2. The specificity of language(s) as compared to other animal communication systems. Hockett is famous (and widely quoted in most works on language evolution) for having proposed (see Hockett 1960) a list of thirteen essential features of language that supposedly sets it apart from other animal communication systems. However, it has been claimed (see Fitch 2009) that, though the set as a whole is specific to human language, each feature can be found in some animal communication system or other. A major question, given that the whole set seems specific to human language, is whether it is complete and what implications the fact that each feature could be shared with other species has for the field of language evolution. 

3. Evolution of language: biological or cultural. When Pinker and Bloom revived the field of language evolution in 1990, their approach was firmly biological. However, nowadays, 'social' accounts, emphasizing cultural rather than biological evolution, seem prominent. An important question is whether such social scenarios can entirely do away with biological approaches, given that they seem to rest on notions such as 'cooperation', usually understood as 'altruistic' in the biological sense (i.e., benefiting to the addressee, but detrimental to the agent). How exactly biological and cultural evolutions interact in such social accounts is a major question. 

4. Cognitive vs. social scenarios. While cultural evolution views are squarely social, they nevertheless tend to sneak in some cognition: for instance, Dunbar's defense of his social account, based on the prevalence of gossip in pub conversations, seems to ignore the fact that gossip is contentful and hence necessitates fairly important cognitive (e.g., conceptual) abilities. On the other hand, biological evolution views could be either social (in line with the so-called Machivellian hypothesis on cognition) or cognitive. Disentangling cognitive from social issues, or at least articulating them precisely seems fairly urgent. 

5. Biolinguistics. Biolinguistics is a lively field (as shown by the existence of a dedicated ejournal), concerned with the biological underpinnings of language, from brain circuits to evolution, thus covering all fields of linguistics (phonology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) and looking further towards psycho- and neurolinguistics. It is also concerned with the development of language and with its neuro-developmental as well as neuropsychological deficits