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Call for papers: GLOW workshop on biolinguistics

Workshop on Biolinguistics at GLOW 36
University of Lund - 2 April 2013
Abstracts due: November 15, 2012
http://konferens.ht.lu.se/glow-36/call-for-papers/workshop-1-biolinguistics

Organizer: Anna Maria di Sciullo
Invited speakers: Robert Berwick, Charles Yang

This workshop addresses fundamental questions on the properties of the Language Faculty from a biolinguistic perspective, with a particular attention on how this perspective contributes to further understanding of linguistic phenomena with large empirical coverage.

The study of the relation between humans’ biology and the Language Faculty is central in Biolinguistics (Lenneberg 1967; Chomsky 1983, 2005; Jenkins 2000, 2004; Gallistel, 2009; Di Sciullo et al 2010; Berwick and Chomsky 2011; Di Sciullo and Boeckx 2011).

While theoretical hypotheses about this relation emerged in the generative enterprise since its beginnings, recent developments directly address the issue in terms of the properties of the ‘language organ’. Different hypotheses about the properties of the generative procedure giving rise to the discrete infinity of language are still under discussion, and their connection with biology is open to important cross-disciplinary work (Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch 2002; Piattelli-Palmarini and Uriagereka 2008; Larson 2011; Lasnik 2011, 2012; Arsenijević and Hinzen 2012).

Advances have been made in human-animal studies to differentiate human language from animal communication (Jarvis 2004; Fitch and Hauser 2004; Friederici 2009; Fitch 2010). Contributions from neuroscience also point to the exclusive properties of the human brain for language (Moro 2010; Friederici et al. 2011; Patel 2008, 2012). Studies of genetically based language impairments also contribute to the understanding of the properties of the language organ (Ross and Bever 2004; Bishop et al. 2005; Hancock and Bever 2012; Patel et al. 2008; Wexler 2003).

This workshop invites contributions showing how the theoretical and experimental works on the biological basis of language shed light on core linguistic phenomena.

The relation between language variation and biology is another important area of research in biolinguistics, as variation is a constant in the observable biological world, as it is in language variation and historical evolution (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981; Lewontin 2000). Theoretical approaches to language variation stemming from works on population genetics, and syntactic approaches to language phylogeny opened new horizons for the study of language variation, and more broadly for language development, including its development in the child (Bever 1981; Longobardi and Guardiano 2011; Niyogi 2006, Niyogi and Berwick 2009; Di Sciullo 2011, 2012, Biberauer, Holmberg and Roberts 2012). Recent works on the poverty of the stimulus bring additional arguments to the biological nature of language, and they address central issues related to deterministic/probabilistic theories of language learning and language variation (Berwick et al 2011; Yang 2002, 2008, 2011).

Other works address the question of why parameters emerge and why resetting of parameters occurs, and consider the role of external, environmental factors in language variation and change. This workshop invites contributions with large empirical coverage that address fundamental questions on language development and language variation and their technical instantiations as feature-valuing, symmetry-breaking, functional flexibility, as a distinctive instance of variation and development in the natural world.

The relation between Language as a computational procedure and principles reducing complexity has been part of the research agenda in the generative enterprise since the 1950’s. Framed within biolinguistics, the principles of efficient computation are natural laws affecting the properties of the operations and the derivations of the (Narrow) Language Faculty (Chomsky 2005, 2011). They apply to Merge (No Tampering Condition), as well as to the derivational procedure (minimal search, phases, Agree), to SM (Pronounce the Minimum, Chomsky 2011), and CI (Reference Set, Reinhart 2006; Local Economy, Fox 1999) interfaces. They reduce the specific properties of the Language Faculty, while they affect all aspects of the generative procedure.

Several questions arise regarding the properties of the so-called ‘third factor’ in language development, including the following:  How do the principles of efficient computation address classical computational notions of complexity, such as Kolmogorov’s 1965 definition, as well as novel notions of complexity? How are they related to natural laws? What is their relation with the Strong Minimalist Thesis? This workshop invites contributions with large empirical coverage that address fundamental questions on principles of efficient computation in the study of the biology of language.

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ICREA International Symposium on BIolinguistics

ICREA International Symposium on Biolinguistics
October 1-3, 2012
Barcelona, Spain

The meeting, sponsored by the Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies (ICREA), and organized by Cedric Boeckx, will take place at the Aula Magna of the Universitat de Barcelona (historic building).  The meeting, open to the public (no registration fee required), will provide an interdisciplinary forum focused on the biological foundations of the human capacity for language. It will bring together eminent scholars in cognitive science, ethology, genetics, neuroscience, comparative psychology, theoretical linguistics, philosophy of mind, paleoneurology, robotics, paleogenomics, and more. Here is an alphabetical list of invited participants:

-Albert Bastardas (U. Barcelona, ICREA Academia program)
-Luca Bonatti (ICREA/U. Pompeu Fabra)
-Emiliano Bruner (CENIEH, Burgos)
-Ruth de Diego Balaguer (ICREA/U. Barcelona)
-Tecumseh Fitch (U. Vienna)
-Koji Fujita (U. Kyoto)
-Judit Gervain (CNRS, U. Paris Descartes)
-Toni Gomila (U. Balearic Islands)
-Kleanthes Grohmann (U. Cyprus)
-Simon Kirby (U. Edinburgh)
-Carles Lalueza-Fox (U. Pompeu Fabra)
-Kazuo Okanoya (U. Tokyo)
-Christophe Pallier (CNRS/INSERM-CEA, Paris)
-Antoni Rodriguez-Fornells (ICREA/U. Barcelona)
-Joana Rossello (U. Barcelona)
-Douglas Saddy (U. Reading)
-Wendy Sandler (U. Haifa)
-Ricard Sole (ICREA/U. Pompeu Fabra; Santa Fe Institute)
-Luc Steels (ICREA/U. Pompeu Fabra)
-Sonja Vernes (Max Planck, Nijmegen)
-Charles Yang (U. Pennsylvania)

In addition to these invited talks, members of the Barcelona Biolinguistics Inititative and their collaborators will present posters featuring their recent works.

A complete program will be available next month.

Origin of Language session at ICL 19

Origin of Language & Human Cognition
ICL 19 - Geneva, July 22-27, 2013
http://www.cil19.org/en/sessions/session-2/
Call for papers: http://www.cil19.org/en/calls-for-papers/second-call-for-papers/ due Sept 1, 2012

This parallel session will be structured around five major issues that arise in the domain of the evolution of language. Abstracts are solicited which address one or more of the following issues:

1. The relevance of the distinction between I-language and E-languages for the question of language evolution. Chomsky introduced a major distinction between I-language (the inner, psychological, knowledge of grammar) and E-languages (the public languages, such as English, French, Italian, Japanese, etc.). E-languages are public by contrast with I-language, which is private. This may mean that there are not one, but two evolutionary stories to be told, one relevant to the evolution of I-language and one relevant to the evolution of E-languages. Additionally, the evolutionary processes involved might be different, e.g., one could be biological while the other one could be cultural. However, the distinction between I-language and E-languages has been largely ignored in the literature on language evolution.

2. The specificity of language(s) as compared to other animal communication systems. Hockett is famous (and widely quoted in most works on language evolution) for having proposed (see Hockett 1960) a list of thirteen essential features of language that supposedly sets it apart from other animal communication systems. However, it has been claimed (see Fitch 2009) that, though the set as a whole is specific to human language, each feature can be found in some animal communication system or other. A major question, given that the whole set seems specific to human language, is whether it is complete and what implications the fact that each feature could be shared with other species has for the field of language evolution.

3. Evolution of language: biological or cultural. When Pinker and Bloom revived the field of language evolution in 1990, their approach was firmly biological. However, nowadays, "social" accounts, emphasizing cultural rather than biological evolution, seem prominent. An important question is whether such social scenarios can entirely do away with biological approaches, given that they seem to rest on notions such as "cooperation", usually understood as "altruistic" in the biological sense (i.e., benefiting to the addressee, but detrimental to the agent). How exactly biological and cultural evolutions interact in such social accounts is a major question.

4. Cognitive vs. social scenarios. While cultural evolution views are squarely social, they nevertheless tend to sneak in some cognition: for instance, Dunbar's defense of his social account, based on the prevalence of gossip in pub conversations, seems to ignore the fact that gossip is contentful and hence necessitates fairly important cognitive (e.g., conceptual) abilities. On the other hand, biological evolution views could be either social (in line with the so-called Machivellian hypothesis on cognition) or cognitive. Disentangling cognitive from social issues, or at least articulating them precisely seems fairly urgent.

5. Biolinguistics. Biolinguistics is a lively field (as shown by the existence of a dedicated ejournal), concerned with the biological underpinnings of language, from brain circuits to evolution, thus covering all fields of linguistics (phonology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) and looking further towards psycho- and neurolinguistics. It is also concerned with the development of language and with its neuro-developmental as well as neuropsychological deficits.