Videos from Evolang 9

Videos of the plenary lectures from the recent Evolang9 conference in Kyoto are now available online at:
http://ocw.kyoto-u.ac.jp/international-conference-en/31 

The videos of the Kyoto Conference on Biolinguistics are also now available at:
http://ocw.kyoto-u.ac.jp/international-conference-en/30

(via Evolutionary Linguistics)

Biolinguistics videos

Thanks to Joel Zavala Tovar, here are some links to video lectures about the biolinguistic enterprise:

• Noam Chomsky, "The biology of the language faculty: its perfection, past & future"
• Sam Epstein & Dan Seely, "The anatomy of biolinguistic minimalism"

Recently in the headlines

• NPR: Signing, singing, speaking: how language evolved
• NPR: From grunting to gabbing: why humans can talk
• NYT: Words cannot express (Derek Bickerton's review of Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass)
• BBC: Coping with foreign accent syndrome (includes video)
• NineMSN: Children develop own language in cave
• NYU: Video of Alec Marantz & Noam Chomsky: "Poverty of stimulus - unfinished business"

Podcast: WNYC Radiolab on Words

The August 9 edition of WNYC Radiolab, which you can find here, has a linguistic theme, and features Elizabeth Spelke. The website summarizes the show as follows:

"It’s almost impossible to imagine a world without words. But in this hour of Radiolab, we try to do just that. We speak to a woman who taught a 27-year-old man the first words of his life, and we hear a firsthand account of what it feels like to have the language center of your brain wiped out by a stroke."

There are more links to earlier language-related episodes and some short videos on that same page.

Seyfarth videos

Here are a couple of videos of Robert Seyfarth talking about vervet monkey calls and theory of mind:

Chomsky in Stuttgart

A video of Noam Chomsky's lecture "Restricting stipulations: consequences and challenges" at Universität Stuttgart on March 24 is now available online. (The website is in German; a direct link to download the video is here.)

Internalist Explorations of Meaning

The following are links to the video records of the talks delivered at the interdisciplinary reading group "Internalist Explorations on Meaning," held in Fall 2007 and organized by Dennis Ott (Harvard University).

• Hilary Putnam - Externalism: Its Motivation And Its Critics

In this talk, delivered at Harvard University on October 4th 2007, one of the major proponents of semantic externalism revisits the subject matter of his 1975 paper "The Meaning Of 'Meaning'," extending and updating his views about the nature of meaning and why it "ain't in the head."

• Noam Chomsky - "On Referring" Revisited

In this talk, delivered at Harvard University on October 30th 2007, the most eminent linguist of modern times argues for a strictly internalist treatment of questions of natural-language meaning. Chomsky discusses externalist approaches of Putnam, Kripke and others who hold that crucial aspects of meaning rely on the nature of an independently given external world. This cherished tenet of philosophy of language, Chomsky argues, has things backwards: dropping unwarranted metaphysical assumptions, we find that the internal language system is purely syntactic and hence "in the head", as a part of the "cognoscitive powers" that construct the organism's Umwelt.

• Ray Jackendoff - Conceptual Semantics

In this talk, delivered at Harvard University on November 13th 2007, Ray Jackendoff elaborates on his internalist approach to the study of meaning, called Conceptual Semantics. According to Jackendoff, it is necessary for semanticists to study not language in isolation, but conceptual structure ("thought"), the domain-general medium of mental representation.

• Juan Uriagereka - How Much Meaning Can Syntax Carve Out?

In this talk, delivered at Harvard University on November 20th 2007, Juan Uriagereka seeks to answer the question how much of natural-language meaning is rooted in syntactic properties of the Language Faculty. Uriagereka argues for a multi-dimensional syntax that provides "spaces" of meaning, from which well-known semantic hierarchies are derived.

• Richard Lewontin - Internalism and Externalism in Biology

Delivered at Harvard University on December 13th 2007.