33.1811, Calls: Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Language, Pragmatics/Japan

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-33-1811. Thu May 19 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.1811, Calls: Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Language, Pragmatics/Japan

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Date: Thu, 19 May 2022 21:32:32
From: Andrew Feeney [andrew.feeney at northumbria.ac.uk]
Subject: The Place of Pragmatics in the Evolution of Language: First, Last or in Parallel? Workshop at: Joint Conference on the Evolution of Language

 
Full Title: The Place of Pragmatics in the Evolution of Language: First, Last or in Parallel? Workshop at: Joint Conference on the Evolution of Language 
Short Title: Prag at JCoLE2022 

Date: 04-Sep-2022 - 05-Sep-2022
Location: Kanazawa, Japan 
Contact Person: Andrew Feeney
Meeting Email: andrew.feeney at northumbria.ac.uk
Web Site: https://northumbriaenglish.org/pragmatics-and-language-evolution/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Philosophy of Language; Pragmatics 

Call Deadline: 24-Jun-2022 

Meeting Description:

Interest in language has a recorded history stretching back to the ancient
Greeks. Yet for many years the study of ‘grammar’ subsumed inquiry into
linguistic sounds and their patterns (phonetics and phonology), the internal
structure of meaningful units (morphology), the relationships between these
units (syntax) and the encoding of meanings (semantics). A lamentably late
addition to these fields of investigation has been the study of how speakers
communicate in context, a domain only afforded a name in the last century:
pragmatics (Morrison, 1938). 

A similar pattern of initial neglect can be seen in the recent history of the
study of linguistics within language evolution. The publication of early
seminal works by Bickerton (1990) and Pinker and Bloom (1990) established an
emphasis on structural aspects of language, a disposition that has since
increased with a reductionist focus on primary, underlying computations
(Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch, 2002; Pinker and Jackendoff, 2005). 

Only recently has this imbalance begun to be corrected and papers are now
appearing with an explicit focus on the role of pragmatics in the evolutionary
emergence of language. We argue that a spotlight on pragmatic competence is
not only to be welcomed, but is indispensable in understanding the emergence
and evolution of language as a tool of communication in the hominin clade. For
the purposes of this workshop we take it as axiomatic that pragmatic
competence is fundamental to language in which ‘communication depends upon the
ability of human beings to attribute mental states to others’ (Origgi and
Sperber, 2004). However a number of questions arise before the nature of the
pragmatic role in language evolution can be fully established and it is these
which the workshop intends to address.


Call for Papers:

This hybrid workshop aims to bring together researchers working with an
explicit focus on the role of pragmatics in the evolutionary emergence of
language. We argue that a spotlight on pragmatic competence is not only to be
welcomed, but is indispensable in understanding the emergence and evolution of
language as a tool of communication in the hominin clade. For the purposes of
this workshop we take it as axiomatic that pragmatic competence is fundamental
to language in which ‘communication depends upon the ability of human beings
to attribute mental states to others’ (Origgi and Sperber, 2004). However a
number of questions arise before the nature of the pragmatic role in language
evolution can be fully established.
We therefore invite contributions (both online and on site: please indicate
which mode of presentation you intend in your proposal) for papers of 40
minutes (25 presentation + 15 discussion) on questions including (but not
exclusively):
- to what extent was pragmatic competence foundational to the emergence of
language? 
- were the earliest forms of language (protolanguage in the literature) more
akin to the vocal or gestural communication systems seen in other species,
before human-type pragmatic aspects of cognition were in place? 
- what is the balance between biological and socio-cultural factors in the
nature and evolutionary development of these cognitive processes? 
- can the answer to these questions shed light on the fundamental question of
when language first appeared in humans or one of our ancestral species? 
- what constitutes evidence and what methodological forms of inquiry are most
appropriate in the exploration of evolutionary cognitive and linguistic
pragmatics?
Abstracts should be submitted as PDFs to:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=pragjcole2022

no later than 24 June 2022.
Abstracts should not exceed one A4 page (one additional page for references is
allowed).

Workshop homepage:
https://northumbriaenglish.org/pragmatics-and-language-evolution/

Organisers: 
Andrew Feeney andrew.feeney at northumbria.ac.uk 
Billy Clark billy.clark at northumbria.ac.uk            
@billylinguist




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LINGUIST List: Vol-33-1811	
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