22.4833, Confs: Biolinguistics, Cognitive Science, General Ling/USA

Sun Dec 4 15:00:51 UTC 2011

LINGUIST List: Vol-22-4833. Sun Dec 04 2011. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 22.4833, Confs: Biolinguistics, Cognitive Science, General Ling/USA

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Eastern Michigan U <aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U <hdry at linguistlist.org>

Reviews: Veronika Drake, U of Wisconsin-Madison
Monica Macaulay, U of Wisconsin-Madison
Rajiv Rao, U of Wisconsin-Madison
Joseph Salmons, U of Wisconsin-Madison
Anja Wanner, U of Wisconsin-Madison
       <reviews at linguistlist.org>

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University,
and donations from subscribers and publishers.

Editor for this issue: Amy Brunett <brunett at linguistlist.org>
================================================================  
Visit LL's Multitree project for over 1000 trees dynamically generated
from scholarly hypotheses about language relationships:
          http://multitree.linguistlist.org/

LINGUIST is pleased to announce the launch of an exciting new feature:  
Easy Abstracts! Easy Abs is a free abstract submission and review facility 
designed to help conference organizers and reviewers accept and process 
abstracts online.  Just go to: http://www.linguistlist.org/confcustom, and 
begin your conference customization process today! With Easy Abstracts, 
submission and review will be as easy as 1-2-3!

===========================Directory==============================  

1)
Date: 03-Dec-2011
From: Bridget Samuels [bridget.samuels at gmail.com]
Subject: LSA Meeting Organized Session on Biolinguistics

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sun, 04 Dec 2011 10:00:16
From: Bridget Samuels [bridget.samuels at gmail.com]
Subject: LSA Meeting Organized Session on Biolinguistics

E-mail this message to a friend:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/emailmessage/verification.cfm?iss=22-4833.html&submissionid=4537103&topicid=4&msgnumber=1

LSA Meeting Organized Session on Biolinguistics 

Date: 05-Jan-2012 - 05-Jan-2012 
Location: Portland, OR, USA 
Contact: Bridget Samuels 
Contact Email: bridget at umd.edu 
Meeting URL: http://www.research.biolinguistics.eu/SIG 

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; General Linguistics 

Other Specialty: Biolinguistics 

Meeting Description: 

The Organized Session on Biolinguistics will be held from 4-7pm on 5 January 2012 at the LSA Annual Meeting. All are welcome to attend but must register for the LSA Annual Meeting in order to do so.

Moderators: LSA Special Interest Group on Biolinguistics coordinators
Kleanthes K. Grohmann (kleanthi at ucy.ac.cy)
Bridget Samuels (bridget.samuels at gmail.com) 

The goal of biolinguistics is to explore theories of language that are biologically plausible as part of an effort to explain how the faculty of language arises both ontogenetically (over the course of an individual's lifetime) and phylogenetically (on an evolutionary timescale). The LSA Special Interest Group on Biolinguistics, founded in 2009, seeks to explore these questions as well as to help the field of biolinguistics define itself by, as stated in the SIG description, '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.' 

This session is thematically arranged into three blocks concerning questions that have emerged at the forefront of current biolinguistic research: (1) How do linguistic operations relate to other cognitive abilities? (2) More specifically, where does the syntactic operation Merge come from? And (3) how can archaeology and other inquiries into the past inform our knowledge of language evolution? The presenters selected to address these questions include both linguists and biologists from across North America and Europe; some are young researchers, while others are already established as recognized leaders in the field. 

'Language faculty': The first two talks address question (1), how the language faculty relates to other cognitive abilities, in particular in light of Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch's (2002) distinction of a language faculty in the broad sense (FLB) and a language faculty in the narrow sense (FLN). They will discuss matters such as whether linguistic categorization can be considered an exaptation of an FLB property and how the process of language acquisition can be framed from a biolinguistic perspective.

'Merge & more'': Moving on to FLN, two talks will address further properties. One examines the relation between language and arithmetic from a biolinguistic perspective on the basis of complex numerals, which are assembled and interpreted though Merge and the recursive procedure of FLN. The other deals with the minimal properties of Merge within FLN in an attempt to reach conclusions about the possible evolutionary steps necessary to arrive at the complexities of human language.

'Past, present, and future': The final presentation on (prehistoric) geometric engravings  draws on research from paleoanthropology and archaeology in order to further specify the properties of the computational system, with particular reference to language. The biolinguistic core underlying all five presentations will be debated further at a concluding roundtable discussion involving the moderators, the speakers, and the participating audience. 

Session 1: The Language Faculty
Alexander Clark
'Distributional learning as a biologically plausible theory of language acquisition'
Rose-Marie Déchaine & Mireille Tremblay
'Categorization, cognition and biolinguistics'

Session 2: Merge and More
Anna Maria Di Sciullo
'Arithmetic and language as biologically grounded in FLN'
Bradley Larson
'A vestigial operation'

Session 3: Past, Present, and Future
Víctor Longa
'Prehistoric geometric engravings and language: A computational approach'
Note: All participants, moderated by the organizers
Roundtable Discussion

-----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-22-4833	
----------------------------------------------------------
Visit LL's Multitree project for over 1000 trees dynamically generated
from scholarly hypotheses about language relationships:
          http://multitree.linguistlist.org/