Deadline extended: Methods in Biolinguistics Workshop

The deadline for abstracts for the Methods in Biolinguistics Workshop at the 2013 LSA Summer Institute has been extended to March 15. Please see the original announcement for details.

CFP: Methods in Biolinguistics Workshop

Methods in Biolinguistics Workshop
at the LSA Summer Institute
Ann Arbor, MI - July 12, 2013

In conjunction with the LSA Special Interest Group on Biolinguistics, we invite the submission of abstracts for a workshop on methodology in biolinguistics, to be held on July 12, 2013 at the LSA Summer Institute at the University of Michigan.

The goal of biolinguistics is to explore theories of language that are biologically plausible as part of an effort to explain how the faculty of language arises both ontogenetically (over the course of an individual’s lifetime) and phylogenetically (on an evolutionary timescale). The LSA Special Interest Group on Biolinguistics, founded in 2009, seeks to explore these questions as well as to help the field of biolinguistics define itself by, as stated in the SIG description, “helping to identify what makes biolinguistics ‘bio’ (and ‘linguistic’), initiate discussions on how it differs from previous models of generative grammar (and how it doesn’t), debate whether generative grammar is actually a prerequisite […] and so on.”

In this workshop, we will foster dialogue on biolinguistic methodology. This topic emerged as a topic of interest and concern during the roundtable discussion at the end of the Workshop on Biolinguistics Organized Session at the LSA Annual Meeting in Portland, January 2012. Specifically, we aim with this workshop to field presentations about how biolinguists (both practicing and aspiring ones) can contribute to interdisciplinary dialogue and be informed consumers of data and literature from fields such as genetics, archaeology, and evolutionary biology. We will also feature morning and afternoon roundtable discussions with the speakers.

Invited speakers:      Noam Chomsky, MIT (T.B.C.)

                                 Norbert Hornstein, University of Maryland

Abstracts for 30-minute oral presentations should be anonymous and between 200-500 words. Please, no more than one single-authored and one joint-authored abstract per person.

Abstracts are due March 1, 2013.

Please send abstracts, preferably in .PDF format, to both:

Kleanthes Grohmann – kleanthi@ucy.ac.cy

Bridget Samuels – bridget.samuels@gmail.com

2012 LSA Meeting: Organized Session on Biolinguistics

The Organized Session on Biolinguistics will be held from 4-7pm on 5 January 2012 at the LSA Annual Meeting in Portland, OR. All are welcome to attend but must register for the LSA Annual Meeting in order to do so. 


Moderators: LSA Special Interest Group on Biolinguistics coordinators 
Kleanthes K. Grohmann, University of Cyprus (kleanthi@ucy.ac.cy) 
Bridget Samuels, California Institute of Technology (bridget.samuels@gmail.com) 


The goal of biolinguistics is to explore theories of language that are biologically plausible as part of an effort to explain how the faculty of language arises both ontogenetically (over the course of an individual's lifetime) and phylogenetically (on an evolutionary timescale). The LSA Special Interest Group on Biolinguistics, founded in 2009, seeks to explore these questions as well as to help the field of biolinguistics define itself by, as stated in the SIG description, 'helping to identify what makes biolinguistics 'bio' (and 'linguistic'), initiate discussions on how it differs from previous models of generative grammar (and how it doesn't), debate whether generative grammar is actually a prerequisite […] and so on.' 


This session is thematically arranged into three blocks concerning questions that have emerged at the forefront of current biolinguistic research: (1) How do linguistic operations relate to other cognitive abilities? (2) More specifically, where does the syntactic operation Merge come from? And (3) how can archaeology and other inquiries into the past inform our knowledge of language evolution? The presenters selected to address these questions include both linguists and biologists from across North America and Europe; some are young researchers, while others are already established as recognized leaders in the field. 


'Language faculty': The first two talks address question (1), how the language faculty relates to other cognitive abilities, in particular in light of Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch's (2002) distinction of a language faculty in the broad sense (FLB) and a language faculty in the narrow sense (FLN). They will discuss matters such as whether linguistic categorization can be considered an exaptation of an FLB property and how the process of language acquisition can be framed from a biolinguistic perspective. 


Alexander Clark, 'Distributional learning as a biologically plausible theory of language acquisition'
Rose-Marie Déchaine & Mireille Tremblay, ‘Categorization, cognition and biolinguistics’


'Merge & more': Moving on to FLN, two talks will address further properties. One examines the relation between language and arithmetic from a biolinguistic perspective on the basis of complex numerals, which are assembled and interpreted though Merge and the recursive procedure of FLN. The other deals with the minimal properties of Merge within FLN in an attempt to reach conclusions about the possible evolutionary steps necessary to arrive at the complexities of human language. 

Anna Maria Di Sciullo, ‘Arithmetic and language as biologically grounded in FLN’

Bradley Larson, ‘A vestigial operation’

'Past, present, and future': The final presentation on (prehistoric) geometric engravings draws on research from paleoanthropology and archaeology in order to further specify the properties of the computational system, with particular reference to language. The biolinguistic core underlying all five presentations will be debated further at a concluding roundtable discussion involving the moderators, the speakers, and the participating audience.

Víctor Longa, ‘Prehistoric geometric engravings and language: A computational approach’
All participants, moderated by the organizers: Roundtable Discussion

LSA Special Interest Group on Biolinguistics

At the Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting in January 2010, the newly-approved LSA Special Interest Group on Biolinguistics had its first meeting. Below is the text of the founding proposal for the group. We hope to have more news in the coming months about further group activities, including a home page on the LSA website and a presence at the 2011 LSA meeting. If you are interested in being part of this (all LSA members are welcome; it's free), please let one of the founders know.

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LSA Special Interest Group on Biolinguistics

We believe that there is an expressed need for the Biolinguistics SIG. With the term being used widely (and often loosely, and with different conceptions by different people, sometimes even negatively) in recent years, it is time that it receive a more graspable shape, an initiative this SIG would like to engage in. The timing is very opportune: In the past couple of years, several initiatives have been formed dedicated to biolinguistics, some even involving one of the co-proposers: the free online journal Biolinguistics (http://www.biolinguistics.eu), edited by Kleanthes Grohmann and Cedric Boeckx, which currently has more than 2,500 subscribers and is supported financially by the co-proposer’s institution (University of Cyprus), the Cambridge Handbook of Biolinguistics, currently in preparation (also edited by Kleanthes Grohmann and Cedric Boeckx), the new John Benjamins book series Language Faculty and Beyond (edited by Kleanthes Grohmann and Pierre Pica), the Biolinguistics Initiative Research Group (formed by Cedric Boeckx), and more.

The Biolinguistics SIG will contribute to the field by helping to identify what makes biolinguistics ‘bio’ (and ‘linguistic’), initiate discussions on how it differs from previous models of generative grammar (and how it doesn’t), debate whether generative grammar is actually a prerequisite (arguably to be answered in the negative), and so on. This focus obviously sets the Biolinguistics SIG apart from other entities of the LSA.

The co-proposers of the Biolinguistics SIG are Dr. Kleanthes Grohmann, a tenured Associate Professor from the University of Cyprus and LSA member since 1997, and Dr. Bridget Samuels, post-doctoral researcher at the University of Maryland and LSA member since 2004:

Kleanthes K. Grohmann (Cyprus) kleanthi@ucy.ac.cy

Bridget Samuels (Maryland) bridget@umd.edu