30.1635, Summer Schools: Language Universals and Language Diversity in an Evolutionary Perspective/Italy
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Mon Apr 15 16:16:47 UTC 2019
LINGUIST List: Vol-30-1635. Mon Apr 15 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.
Subject: 30.1635, Summer Schools: Language Universals and Language Diversity in an Evolutionary Perspective/Italy
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Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2019 12:16:41
From: Sonia Cristofaro [sonia.cristofaro at unipv.it]
Subject: Language Universals and Language Diversity in an Evolutionary Perspective/Italy
Language Universals and Language Diversity in an Evolutionary Perspective
Host Institution:
Website: http://lude.lakecomoschool.org/
Dates: 09-Sep-2019 - 12-Sep-2019
Location: Como, Italy
Focus: In the 1960s, the pioneering work of Joseph Greenberg led to the discovery that grammatical variation in the world’s languages is not random. Some grammatical properties are significanly more frequent than others cross-linguistically. Also, there are recurrent implicational correlations between logically independent grammatical properties, such
that, if a language has some property X, it also usually has property Y (whereas Y can occur independently). While these are statistical, rather than exceptionless patterns, they are commonly referred to as language universals.
Ever since Greenberg’s work, language universals have been extensively investigated both in linguistics and in a variety of other disciplines, including for example psychology, biology, and computer science. In linguistic typology, the research tradition that originated directly from Greenberg’s work, universals are often explained in an evolutionary perspective, based on a general view of languages as complex adaptive systems. Universals result from multiple small-scale actions of different speakers over time. A variety of neurocognitive mechanisms, manifested at the level of speech production and processing, lead individual speakers to create novel grammatical structures from pre-existing ones. These structures are then selected, propagated and maintained in the language as a result of the dynamics of social interaction between adult speakers, as well as the dynamics of language acquisition (the vertical process of language transmission from one generation of speakers to anothe
r).
To the extent that the same structures are recurrently created, propagated and maintained in different languages, an overall pattern will emerge. This is in contrast with the theoretical framework that goes back to Noam Chomsky, where language universals follow from static inbuilt constraints in a speaker’s mind.
While this evolutionary view is widely shared at the theoretical level, its consequences for empirical research on language universals and explanations thereof are still relatively under-explored. What is the exact nature of the neurocognitive mechanisms that lead speakers to recurrently create the same structures in different languages? How do mechanisms of social interaction lead to the propagation of individual structures? What is the role of language acquisition in shaping particular universal patterns? How can we disentangle and accurately model the effects of different mechanisms of creation, propagation and maintainance of particular structures? How can we extract evidence about these effects from the ever growing body of available data on the grammatical structure of different, unrelated languages all over the world?
The school brings together leading experts on these topics, who will provide state-of-the-art reviews of the relevant issues and related research prospects.
Minimum Education Level: MA
Description:
Courses:
Balthasar Bickel (University of Zurich)
Linguistic biases in biological perspective
Holger Diessel (University of Jena)
The Grammar Network: How linguistic structure is shaped by language use
Nicholas R. Evans (Australian National University, Canberra/ ARC Centre of
Excellence for the Dynamics of Language)
The grammar of others: social cognition and linguistic diversity
Martin Haspelmath (Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History,
Jena/ Leipzig University)
Some universals of grammar with particular reference to coding asymmetries
Sabine Stoll, University of Zurich
Language development: uniformity in diversity?
Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics
Cognitive Science
General Linguistics
Historical Linguistics
Language Acquisition
Psycholinguistics
Typology
Tuition: 135 EUR
Tuition Explanation: The fee covers all lectures, course materials, wi-fi connection, lunches and
coffee breaks.
Registration: 14-Apr-2019 to 15-Jun-2019
Contact Person: Sonia Cristofaro
Email: sonia.cristofaro at unipv.it
Apply on the web: http://lude.lakecomoschool.org/application/
Registration Instructions:
Please note that, due to space constraints, we can only accommodate up to 50
participants, so we kindly ask prospective participants to apply through the
application form provided on the school website
(http://lude.lakecomoschool.org/application/) by June 15th, 2019. Notification
of acceptance will be given by June 21st, 2019.
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