Fwd: Call for papers: Language, gesture, community & language evolution

[Fischer Susan]

Please do not respond to me:  I've boldfaced the contact info for the  
organizers.
SDF

Begin forwarded message:

CALL FOR PAPERS
Language, gesture and community: Linguistic anthropologists engage  
theories of language evolution.

Society for Linguistic Anthropology, American Anthropological  
Association, San Francisco, November 2008

Deadlines: Contact organizers asap.  Draft of abstract due March 29  
to organizers.

We are looking for papers from a wide variety of methods and  
approaches that will highlight the importance of community oriented  
communicative competences and that detail the connections between  
these patterns and questions of language evolution.

Organizers: Leila Monaghan: Leila.Monaghan at gmail.com
Angela Nonaka: angelanonaka at mail.utexas.edu
Richard Senghas: Richard. Senghas at sonoma.edu


DRAFT SESSION PROPOSAL

At the heart of all human communication is creating and interpreting  
patterns.  Linguists and psycholinguists such as Noam Chomsky and  
Steven Pinker have tended to focus on the grammar of these  
communication forms, while linguistic anthropologists like Dell  
Hymes, Richard Bauman, Alessandro Duranti, Charles Goodwin, Marjorie  
Harness Goodwin, Bambi Schiefflin, and Paul Kroskrity have focused on  
on seeing patterns in immediate contexts, performances and, more  
broadly speaking, language ideologies.  While linguists,  
psychologists and biologists have often dominated discussions on the  
evolution of human communication, this panel shows that linguistic  
anthropologists, working from the richness found in community  
interactions, have crucial insights to offer this general  
conversation.  In this panel we examine current theories on language  
evolution and how recent linguistic anthropology scholarship and  
other interaction-oriented theory shed light on the creative and ever- 
changing biological and cultural phenomenon that is language.
Language and more the general communication forms that all human  
communities use today developed in social settings.  We argue that  
evolutionary pressures were for not one specific kind of patterning  
such as found in syntax or phonology, but for multiple and redundant  
communicative forms making general communication among people as  
comprehensible as possible.  This includes examining the creative use  
of language.  Chomskian linguists often have a narrow definition of  
creativity.  We recognize that a wide range of creative language  
forms including poetry and other performance genres are part of both  
everyday and special occasion communicative patterns.  Rather than  
seeing these forms as unusual, we see them as an essential part of  
understanding the nature of communication.

One key aspect of this panel will be reviewing current work on sign  
language, particularly work on new languages like that found in the  
indigenous sign language community of Bhan Khor, Thailand.  We argue  
these communities are not exceptions to the norms of the widespread  
use of spoken languages, but instead manifestations under specific  
circumstances of a general combined spoken-gestural communication  
system.  Part of our argument is that spoken and gestural  
communication co-evolved, that we cannot say that one aspect or the  
other evolved first.
Another aspect of our argument is that grammatical and performance  
patterns of any communication system will reflect the environments in  
which they exist, particularly the environments in which children are  
socialized.  Ways to address questions of language evolution include  
analysis of observed behavior in natural language settings. We  
consider indigenous signing communities, children acquiring culture  
as part of language acquisition, and cross-cultural comparisons of  
what happens to language in different socialization contexts.

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