[lingtalks] February 8: Jim Hurford (Linguistics Colloquium)

[Tara Boswell]

On Monday 8 February at 2pm, Jim Hurford, (University of Edinburgh;  
http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~jim/) will give a colloquium in the UCSD  
Linguistics Department, in AP&M 4301.


:: Abstract ::

SYNTAX IN THE LIGHT OF EVOLUTION

The talk will, very superficially, go over some of the arguments in a  
forthcoming book, `The Origins of Grammar'.  Standing back, and  
looking at language and linguistics from an evolutionary perspective,  
certain themes emerge: similarities and differences are matters of  
degree; linguists' approaches to language are justified, but extreme  
positions are not tenable.  The ideas to be touched on are summarized  
below as bullet, and sub-bullet, and sub-sub-bullet points.  There  
probably will not be time to cover all these ideas in the formal talk,  
but any uncovered items can be raised in discussion.

* ANIMAL SYNTAX?  IMPLICATIONS FOR LANGUAGE AS BEHAVIOUR
   -  Wild animals have no semantically compositional syntax
      .  Combining territorial and sexual messages
      .  Combinatorial, but not compositional, monkey and bird calls
   -  Noncompositional syntax in animals: its possible relevance
   -  Formal Language Theory for the birds, and matters arising
      .  Simplest syntax: birdsong examples
      .  Iteration, competence, performance and numbers
      .  Hierarchically structured behaviour
      .  Overt behaviour and neural mechanisms
      .  Training animals on syntactic `languages'

* SYNTAX IN THE LIGHT OF EVOLUTION
   - Language in its discourse context
   - Speech evolved first
   - Message packaging - Sentence-like units
   - Competence(-plus)
     . Regular production
     . Intuition
     . Gradience
     . Working Memory
   - Individual differences in competence-plus
   - Numerical constraints on competence-plus

* WHAT EVOLVED: LANGUAGE LEARNING CAPACITY
   - Massive storage
   - Hierarchical structure
   - Word-internal structure
   - Syntactic categories
     . Distributional criteria and the proliferation of categories
     . Categories are primitive, too - contra radicalism
     . Multiple default inheritance hierarchies
     . Features
     . Phrasal categories are unnecessary
     . Functional categories - grammatical words
   - Grammatical relations
   - Long range dependencies
   - Constructions, complex items with variables
   - Island constraints

* WHAT EVOLVED: LANGUAGES
   - Widespread features of languages
   - Growth rings - layering
   - Linguists on complexity
   - Piraha
   - Riau Indonesian
   - Creoles and Pidgins
     . Identifying creoles and pidgins
     . Substrates and superstrates
     . Properties of pidgins and creoles
   - Basic Variety
   - New Sign Languages
     . Nicaraguan Sign Language
     . Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language
   - Social correlates of complexity
     . Shared knowledge and a less autonomous code
     . Child and adult learning and morphological complexity
     . Historico-geographic influences on languages

==

Please visit our colloquium webpage for more information about  
upcoming colloquia (as they are confirmed):  
http://ling.ucsd.edu/events/colloquia/