[lingtalks] CHD Seminar: FRIDAY - Bill Croft

[Katie Wagner]

The Center for Human Development Presents

Bill Croft
University of New Mexico
Department of Linguistics

Friday, December 5th
12-1pm (discussion 1-1:40pm)
room 003 in the Cognitive Science Building


"Evolutionary Linguistics: An Emerging Paradigm for the 21st Century"

After a hiatus of nearly a century, linguists have returned Darwin's  
debt to historical linguistics by reintroducing neo-Darwinian  
evolutionary models to the study of language. These models are usually  
presented as evolutionary theories of language change, but in fact  
they are evolutionary theories of language itself. The crucial  
theoretical assumption that must be overcome is the linguistic  
equivalent of biological essentialism: that a language possesses an  
"essence" in the form of a set of rules governing a fixed grammatical  
structure. This view, which dominated 20th century linguistics,  
idealizes away from the all-pervasive variation that exists in human  
language behavior, and the dynamic, evolving system that results from  
that variation. I present an evolutionary framework for language based  
on the philosopher David Hull's General Analysis of Selection,  
outlined in Explaining language change: an evolutionary approach. The  
General Analysis of Selection abstracts away from biology-specific  
elements of selection processes, allowing evolutionary models to be  
applied in a systematic and consistent fashion to change by  
replication in other domains, including conceptual change in science  
and language change. One important element that does not carry over  
from biology (contrary to some views) are the actual mechanisms by  
which evolutionary change occurs. I will describe the types of  
mechanisms that appear to be operating in language change, based on  
recent research, including research in collaboration with a group of  
statistical physicists.


Everyone is welcome.

Speaker list and papers are available at http://www.chd.ucsd.edu/seminar/f08sched.shtml

For any questions about the seminar contact Katie at kgwagner at psy.ucsd.edu



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