The BIOLINGUISTICS Blog

Biolinguistics in Japan

2012-01-19T09:16:00.000-08:00

The website for the Biolinguistics Project, Japan is here: http://www.bioling.jp/english/

Please visit http://www.bioling.jp/english/events/ for information about biolinguistic events in Kyoto this March:

Kyoto Conference on Biolinguistics

- The Human Language Faculty: Its Design, Development and Evolution -

March 12, Monday, 2012, 10am – 6pm

Shirankaikan Inamori Hall, Kyoto University, Medical School Area

Yoshida Konoe-cho, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan [ access map ]

Special Lectures

Cedric Boeckx (ICREA/University of Barcelona) Clarifying the Content of the Third Factor in Language Design

Denis Bouchard (University of Quebec at Montreal) Solving the UG Problem

Naoki Fukui (Sophia University) Merge and (A)symmetry

Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (University of Arizona) (in collaboration with Juan Uriagereka and David Medeiros) Steps towards the Physics of Language

Charles Yang (University of Pennsylvania) Toward a Natural History of Language

Following KCB, EVOLANG IX will be held at Campus Plaza Kyoto on March 13-16, 2012. There will be five workshops on the first day, two of them co-organized by the Biolinguistics Project Japan:

Theoretical Linguistics/Biolinguistics

Invited Speakers:

Cedric Boeckx & Youngmi Jeong
Denis Bouchard
Anna Maria Di Sciullo
Angel Gallego
Koji Sugisaki

Organizers: Roger Martin (Yokohama National University) & Koji Fujita (Kyoto University)

Contact Address: martin@ynu.ac.jp

Language and Brain

Invited Speakers:

Michael A. Arbib (University of Southern California): Evolving the Direct Path in Praxis as a Bridge to Duality of Patterning in Language
Stefano F. Cappa (Vita-Salute University and San Raffaele Scientific Institute): Imaging Syntax and Semantics in the Brain

Organizers: Noriaki Yusa (Miyagi Gakuin Women’s University) & Hajime Ono (Kinki University)

Contact Address: n_yusa@me.com

Recently in the headlines

2012-01-18T18:37:00.000-08:00

Biolinguistics Initiative Barcelona

2012-01-03T01:31:00.001-08:00

Be sure to check out the new website for the Biolinguistics Initiative Barcelona: http://biolinguistics-bcn.blogspot.com/

2012 LSA Meeting: Organized Session on Biolinguistics

2011-12-02T08:57:00.001-08:00

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

Recently in the headlines

2011-12-01T15:12:00.000-08:00

EVOLANG workshops

2011-11-09T13:09:00.000-08:00

via Evolutionary Linguistics:

Call deadline: 30 December 2011
Event Dates: 13 March 2012
Event Location: Kyoto, Japan
Event URL: http://kyoto.evolang.org/content/workshops

The following five workshops have been announced at next year's Evolang9 in Kyoto.
Theoretical Linguistics/Biolinguistics
Language and Brain
Emotion and Language
Animal Communication and Language Evolution
Constructive Approaches to Language Evolution

Detailed descriptions of each of the workshops is available at: http://kyoto.evolang.org/content/workshops

Recently in the headlines

2011-10-31T20:04:00.001-07:00

Google Reader has changed how items are shared, so there is now a new way of receiving the news roundup. If you want to subscribe to the RSS feed of items that will eventually appear here, you can do that here.

Recently in the headlines

2011-10-13T11:54:00.000-07:00

Call for papers: Complex sentences, types of embedding, & recursivity

2011-10-11T14:48:00.001-07:00

Complex Sentences, Types of Embedding, and Recursivity

Invited Speakers: Uli Sauerland (ZAS, Berlin), Edwin Williams (Princeton), Jan-Wouter Zwart (Groningen)

Date: 05-Mar-2012 - 06-Mar-2012
Location: Konstanz, Germany
Contact Person: Andreas Trotzke
Meeting Email: compsent2012@googlemail.com

Call Deadline: 15-Nov-2011

Complex sentences have always been a matter of intense investigation in linguistics. Since complex syntax is clearly evidenced by sentential embedding and since embedding of one sentence in another is taken to signal recursivity of the grammar, the capacity of computing complex sentences is of central interest to the recent hypothesis that syntactic recursion is the defining property of natural language. In the light of more recent claims that complex syntax is not a universal property of all living languages, the issue of how to detect and define syntactic complexity has become a much debated topic in current linguistics.

This workshop deals with the variability, but also with the universality of complex sentences both from a synchronic and from a diachronic perspective. Specifically, are there living or dead languages that lack complex sentences, and what would the evidence consist of? Or can it be shown that sentence embedding is present even in the most controversial cases? These issues pertain to what types of embedding can be distinguished and what kind of basic procedures are underlying them. In particular, are there fundamentally different modes of embedding for clauses and other syntactic constituents? Is there a single criterion for clausal embedding, or does one need to distinguish different types such as sentences with or without a complementizer, nominalizations, different types of infinitives, etc.? Are recursive procedures a sine qua non for complex syntax, or do iterative rather than recursive mechanisms suffice to generate sentence-level embedding? What is the place of recursiv
ity in the grammar then?

The workshop also aims at connecting the issue of complex sentences to interdisciplinary domains of research. How much of a role has the computation of complex sentences played in human evolution? Specifically, has the capacity of sentence embedding been shaped by cultural constraints and thus evolved by some 'ratchet effect' assumed in theories of cultural evolution? Or is it more plausible to hypothesize slight genetic changes causing a 'great leap forward'?

Workshop Organizers: Andreas Trotzke, Josef Bayer & Antje Lahne

Call for Papers:
We invite submissions of anonymous abstracts for 40 minute talks including discussion. Submissions should not exceed one page, 12pt. single spaced, with an optional additional page for examples and references. Either PDF or Word format is accepted. Please upload your abstracts at http://linguistlist.org/confcustom/CompSent2012 by the deadline listed below. The submissions will be reviewed anonymously.

Important Dates:
Submission deadline: 15 November 2011
Notification: 1 December 2011
Workshop: 5-6 March 2012

Call for commentators/Conference: The Past & Future of UG

2011-10-03T14:54:00.001-07:00

The Past & Future of Universal Grammar

Thursday, 15 December 2011 to Sunday, 18 December 2011

Details

Grammar is universal in human populations, pathologies aside. A theory of grammar should thus be a universal theory in this sense. Yet it is widely contended today that it need not be the theory of Universal Grammar (UG), in the sense of its early generative formulations, which have taken UG to be a linguistically specific and species-specific biological endowment consisting of functionally arbitrary formal rules. Theories of universal grammar have also been formulated in a number of different ways in the past, with far from identical underlying axiomatic assumptions. Furthermore, the modern theory of UG itself is currently undergoing a significant reformulation, following the development of Minimalism. This conference aims to provide a forum for assessing and (re-)directing the course that research on universal grammar and the biological foundations of language should take over the coming years and decades, bringing together linguists, psychologists, philosophers, and biologists.

Full Description

Call for Commentators (due October 15, 2011)

We hope to offer a conference fee waiver plus financial help towards accommodation and/or travel costs to all commentators. The call for commentators will be released in August.

Programme

Thursday 15th December – arrival date and registration in Calman Learning Centre, accommodation in Durham Business School.

Public Lecture in Union Society
Tim Crow, University of Oxford: The speciation of modern Homo sapiens

Friday 16th December – Main conference in Calman Learning Centre, Science Site

Session 1: The past of UG
Wolfram Hinzen, Durham University: Three traditions of Universal Grammar
Elisabeth Leiss, University of Munich: Part-whole-relations in the Universal Grammar of the Modistae

Session 2: The future of UG
Guglielmo Cinque, University of Venice: In search of Universal Grammar: the hidden structure of natural language
Anders Holmberg, Newcastle University and Ian Roberts, University of Cambridge:Past and future approaches to linguistic variation

Session 3: No need for UG
Ewa Dabrowska, Northumbria University: What exactly is Universal Grammar, and who has seen it?
Nick Chater, Warwick Business School: Language is shaped by the brain; but not the reverse

Session 4: The evolution of grammar
Maggie Tallerman, Newcastle University: Is the syntax rubicon more of a mirage? A defence of pre-syntactic protolanguage
Ian Tattersall, American Museum of Natural History: A context for the emergence of language

Public Lecture in Union Society
Tom Roeper, University of Massachusetts: The image of mind in the grammar of children

Session 5: The Grammaticalisation of the brain
Christopher Petkov, Newcastle University: T.B.C.
Nathalie Tzourio-Mazoyer, University of Bordeaux: Neural basis of the hemispheric specialization for language
Gavin Clowry, Newcastle University: Human specific aspects of cerebral cortex development

Session 6: Thinking without grammar
Wolfram Hinzen, Durham University: The grammar of thought
Tom Roeper, University of Massachusetts: The UG challenge of Interfaces
Rosemary Varley, Sheffield University: Reason without grammar
Jill de Villiers, Smith College: Which concepts need the human language faculty?

UG: the minimum workshop in Union Society
Hagit Borer, University of Southern California: T.B.C.
Halldor Sigurdsson, Lund University: T.B.C.
Daniel Seely, Eastern Michigan University: Maximising Minimal Merge
Michelle Sheehan, University of Cambridge: How much variation is PF-variation?

Recently in the headlines

2011-09-29T13:34:00.000-07:00

Biolinguistics vol 5 issue 3 published

2011-09-28T17:45:00.001-07:00

Biolinguistics Vol 5, No 3 is now available!

http://www.biolinguistics.eu/index.php/biolinguistics/issue/view/19

Articles

170 Space and the Vision–Language Interface: A Model-Theoretic Approach
Francesco-Alessio Ursini

Reviews

226 Quod Homines tot Sententiae — There Are as Many Opinions as There Are Men
Lluís Barceló-Coblijn

Forum

254 Lenneberg’s Views on Language Development and Evolution and Their
Relevance for Modern Biolinguistics
Cedric Boeckx & Victor M. Longa

274 The Character of Mind
Wolfram Hinzen, Nirmalangshu Mukherji & Bijoy Boruah

Recently in the headlines

2011-09-15T17:56:00.001-07:00

Recently in the headlines

2011-09-01T11:00:00.000-07:00

Recently in the headlines

2011-08-10T14:09:00.000-07:00

SD: Bird song-sharing like vocal sparring
arXiv: The secret foraging behavior of bees
BBC: Millie the mandril develops own sign language (video)
SciAm: A signal for solitude: Monkeys create their own rudimentary language sign
SD: Chinese-English bilinguals are 'automatic' translators
Perspectives on Psychological Science: Mirror neuron forum
Science: Human voice recognition depends on language ability
Nature: What birds have to say about language

I'm going to try to publish news roundup posts more frequently in the future (~biweekly) so stories reach you in a more timely fashion. If there is interest in putting individual news items on twitter, I would be happy to do that as well.

Recently in the headlines

2011-07-22T11:25:00.000-07:00

SD: Birdsong independent of brain size: sex difference in the brain varies according to social status
SD: Learning to count not as easy as 1, 2, 3: working with larger numbers matters
SD: Unexpected function of dyslexia-linked gene: controlling cilia of cells
NS: Parrots join apes & Aristotle in the club of reason
SD: Components of speech recognition pathway in humans identified
Youtube: Chomsky lectures at University of Cologne lecture 1, lecture 2
NS: First evidence that birds tweet using grammar
SD: Dyslexia linked to difficulties in perceiving rhythmic patterns in music
Science: Chimps are good listeners, too
NS: Project Nim: A chimp raised as a human
SD: English for advanced learners: linguists examine obstacles to native-like proficiency in foreign language acquisition
J of Neurosci: Neural coding of syntactic structure in learned vocalizations in the songbird
Nature: Songbirds possess the spontaneous ability to discriminate syntactic rules
Language Log: Finch linguistics
BBC: Lizard has problem-solving skills
LA Times: UC Berkeley asks incoming students to say more than 'hello'
NS: Age no excuse for failing to learn a new language
Geekosystem: Study shows parrot parents name their babies

Biolinguistics Vol 5 Issues 1-2 published

2011-06-28T09:46:00.000-07:00

BIOLINGUISTICS has just published its latest issue at
http://www.biolinguistics.eu/index.php/biolinguistics. We invite you to
review the Table of Contents here and then visit our web site to review
articles and items of interest.

Thanks for the continuing interest in our work,
Kleanthes K. Grohmann and Cedric Boeckx
BIOLINGUISTICS Editors-in-Chief
editor@biolinguistics.eu

BIOLINGUISTICS
Vol 5, No 1-2 (2011)
Table of Contents
http://www.biolinguistics.eu/index.php/biolinguistics/issue/view/18

Editorial
--------
Biolinguistic Perspectives on Recursion: Introduction to the Special Issue
(001-009)
Uli Sauerland, Andreas Trotzke

Articles
--------
Learning Recursion: Multiple Nested and Crossed Dependencies (010-035)
Meinou de Vries, Morten Christiansen, Karl-Magnus Petersson

What in the World Makes Recursion so Easy to Learn? A Statistical Account
of the Staged Input Effect on Learning a Center-Embedded Structure in
Artificial Grammar Learning (AGL) (036-042)
Fenna Poletiek

Recursion in Language: A Layered-Derivation Approach (043-056)
Jan-Wouter Zwart

The Acquisition of Recursion: How Formalism Articulates the Child’s Path
(057-086)
Tom W. Roeper

The Neural Basis of Recursion and Complex Syntactic Hierarchy (087-104)
Angela Dorkas Friederici, Jörg Bahlmann, Roland Friedrich, Michiru
Makuuchi

Implicit Artificial Syntax Processing: Genes, Preference, and Bounded
Recursion (105-132)
Vasiliki Folia, Christian Forkstam, Martin Ingvar, Karl Magnus
Petersson, Karl Magnus Petersson

An Uncouth Approach to Language Recursivity (133-150)
Eleonora Russo, Alessandro Treves

Reviews
--------
“A Running Back” and Forth: A Review of Recursion and Human Language
(151-169)
David J. Lobina

BIOLINGUISTICS
--------
FRONT COVER
The Editors

BACK COVER
The Editors

FULL ISSUE
The Editors

Conference: Evolang IX (March 13-16, 2012, Kyoto)

2011-06-11T21:32:00.000-07:00

Evolang IX Kyoto

The 9th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (Evolang IX) will be held in the historical city of Kyoto, Japan, from the 13th to 16th of March 2012.

Conference Website:

http://kyoto.evolang.org/

Plenary Speakers:

Noam Chomsky
Terrence Deacon
Simon Fisher
Tetsuro Matsuzawa
Jenny Saffran
Minoru Asada
Simon Kirby
Tom Griffiths
Cedric Boeckx

Call for Papers:

The 9th International Conference on the Evolution of Language invites substantive contributions relating to the evolution of human language. Submissions may be in any relevant discipline, including, but not limited to, anthropology, archeology, artificial life, biology, cognitive science, genetics, linguistics, modeling, paleontology, physiology, primatology, and psychology. Normal standards of academic excellence apply. Submitted papers should aim to make clear their own substantive claim, relating this to relevant scientific literature, and briefly setting out the method by which the claim is substantiated, the nature of the relevant data, and/or the core of the theoretical argument concerned. Submissions may be theory-based, but empirical studies should not rest on preliminary results.

Types of Submission

Attendees are limited to one first-authored podium presentation and one first-authored poster per person. There is no limit on second-authored presentations or posters. There are two possible types of submission: Full Papers, which can have a length of between 6 and 8 pages, and Abstracts, which can be up to 2 pages long. All accepted submissions will be published in the proceedings of the conference in a bound volume. All papers or abstracts accepted will be allotted the same presentation length (probably 15 minutes plus 5 minutes discussion). In addition to podium presentations, a dedicated poster session will be held. There will be prizes for the best student presentation and the best poster (from any author); please see below. Please indicate whether your submission is to be considered for inclusion as a talk only, a poster only, or both. Submissions should be made via this website (check back soon for details).

Important Dates (Provisional)

Submissions due: 15 August 2011
Acceptance notifications: 15 October 2011
Final versions due: 1 November 2011

The full call for papers is available here.

**NOTE: Also, on the eve of Evolang 9, a symposium on biolinguistics is scheduled on March 12, 2012, in Kyoto, with Noam Chomsky as a specially invited speaker. Details of this symposium will be announced later.

Recently in the headlines

2011-06-06T16:17:00.000-07:00

SD: Be it numbers or words, the structure of our language remains the same
SD: Bilingualism no big deal for brain, researcher finds
SD: Can you hear me now? Songbirds tweak their tunes in different ways to cope with clamor
BBC: Robots develop their own language
Science Saturday: Who got what wrong? Jerry Fodor vs. Elliott Sober video
SD: Whales have accents & regional dialects
SD: Evolutionary adaptations can be reversed, but rarely

Recently in the headlines

2011-05-10T17:36:00.000-07:00

Sorry I haven't done one of these for a while! I didn't realize it had been so long!

Conference: New Perspectives on Language Creativity

2011-04-28T13:50:00.000-07:00

New Perspectives on Language Creativity: Composition and Recursion
Montréal - September 25-27, 2011

This conference addresses central issues on the computational procedure that gives rise to the discrete infinity of language from a biolinguistic perspective (Lenneberg 1967; Chomsky 1995, 2001, 2005, 2009, 2011; Chierchia 1995, 2004, 2006; Wexler 1996, 2003; Riemsdijk 1998, 2004; Jenkins 2000, 2004, 2011; Pica 2001, 2008; Yang 2002, 2011; Di Sciullo 2005; Pesetsky 2007, 2009; Piattelli-Palmarini & Uriagereka 2008; Friederici 2009; Friedrich & Friederici 2009; Hinzen 2009, 2011; Longobardi & Guardiano 2009, 2011; Di Sciullo et al. 2010; Larson, Déprez & Yamakido 2010; Mukherj 2010; Stabler 2010, 2011; Berwick & Larson 2011; Chomsky 2011; Di Sciullo & Boeckx 2011; Kosta 2011; Lasnik 2011, among other works). It aims to bring long lasting questions on language creativity into new light. It invites contributions on the properties of the composition operation and of the recursive procedure that might very well account for much of the progress made by the human species. It also invites contributions on the neuronal substrate of this computational procedure and raises the question whether this neuronal faculty subserves grammar as well as other recursive systems, including mathematics and music. Finally, it invites contributions that deepen our understanding of the relations between biology and language impairments.

The questions raised thus include, without being limited to, the following:

What is the computational procedure giving rise to the discrete infinity of language?
What do we know about its neuronal substrate?
Why does this procedure seems to be limited in some cases, e.g. complements, and unbounded in other cases, e.g. adjuncts?
Does this computational procedure also subserve mathematics and music?
How do interfaces propagate language creativity?
How does language creativity relate to the genetically attested language disorders and speech impairments?

This conference is part of the cycle of conferences organized by the Biolinguistic Network (www.biolinguistics.uqam.ca) and will be held at the Université du Québec à Montreal on September 25-27, 2011.

The Conferences organized by the International Biolinguistic Network are supported by the Major Collaborative Research on Interface Asymmetries funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and by the Dynamic Interfaces project funded by the Government of Quebec Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture.

Invited speakers:

Roland Friedrich (Department of Mathematics, Humboldt University in Berlin & Department of Neuropsychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig)
Peter Kosta (Department of Slavic Linguistics, University of Potsdam)
Nirmalangshu Mukherj (Department of Philosophy, University of Delhi)
David Pesetsky (Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, MIT)
Pierre Pica (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris)
Henk C. van Riemsdijk (Founder of GLOW, Tilburg University)
Edward Stabler (Department of linguistics, UCLA)

Selection Committee:

Gennaro Chierchia (Harvard University)
Roberto De Almeida (Concordia University)
Anna Maria Di Sciullo (UQAM)
Wolfram Hinzen (Durham University)
Richard Larson (Stony Brook University)
Howard Lasnik (University of Maryland)
Giuseppe Longobardi (University of Trieste)
Ken Wexler (MIT)

Organizing Committee:

Anna Maria Di Sciullo (UQAM)
Calin Batori (UQAM)
Stanca Somesfalean (UQAM)

Call for Papers:

We invite abstracts for oral or poster presentations on these topics.

Abstracts should not exceed one page, 12 pt. single spaced, with an optional additional page for examples and references. Either PDF or Word format is accepted.

Submissions should be anonymous. Contact details (name, affiliation and e-mail) along with the title of the talk or poster should be included in the body of the e-mail.

Abstracts should be sent to: biolinguistics.uqamgmail.com

Important Dates:

Deadline for submission: June 13, 2011
Notification of acceptance: June 27, 2011
Conference: September 25-27, 2011

Conference: Workshop on Verbal Elasticity

2011-04-06T08:42:00.000-07:00

Workshop on Verbal Elasticity
Framing the Verb/Satellite Distinction from a Biolinguistic Perspective
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona - October 3-5, 2011.

Much recent literature has been devoted to study the parametric factors that determine what information (path, manner, result, etc.) can be encoded in verbs, which lies at the heart of typological distinctions such as Talmy's cut between 'satellite-framed' vs. 'verb-framed' languages (Acedo 2010, Demonte 2010, Folli 2002, Talmy 2000, and references therein). Most proposals on this topic focus on the question whether such a distinction is to be attributed to the differences between the categories V and P (Fábregas 2007, Gehrke 2008), the availability of some additional mechanism available only in certain languages ('manner incorporation', 'lexical subordination', etc.; Harley 2005, Haugen 2009, Mateu & Rigau 2008, McIntyre 2004, Zubizarreta & Oh 2007), and the possibility that the relevant parameter has additional consequences outside the VP domain (Demonte 1991, Folli & Ramchand 2005, Snyder 1995, 2001, Svenonius & Son 2008).

This workshop aims at discussing the nature of the 'satellite-framed' vs. 'verb-framed' distinction, its cross-linguistic complexities (resultatives, the P-V interaction, N-N compounding, P stranding, etc.), and its relevance for the study of variation within the context of the biolinguistic enterprise (Boeckx 2006, 2009, Di Sciullo & Boeckx 2011, Piattelli-Palmarini et al. 2009, and references therein) and minimalism (Biberauer 2008, Biberauer et al. 2010, Chomsky 1993 and sub., Chomsky & Berwick 2011, and others).

The workshop is organized by Centre de Lingüística Teòrica at UAB within the research project FFI2010-20634 (subprograma FILO) ‘A New Biolinguistic Orientation for Linguistic Variation’, whose PI is Cedric Boeckx.

Invited Speakers:

Heidi Harley (University of Arizona)
Jaume Mateu (Centre de Lingüística Teòrica - Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
Gillian Ramchand (University of Tromsø)
Koji Sugisaki (Mie University)
Juan Uriagereka (University of Maryland)
María Luisa Zubizarreta (University of Southern California) & Dong-sik Lim (Centro Superior de Investigaciones Científicas)

Call for Papers:

Abstracts are invited for oral presentations (30 minute presentation, plus 10 minute question period) on any topic that contributes to improving our understanding on the described topics. Abstracts should be at most two pages long (A4 paper), including examples and references, with 1 inch/2.5 cm. margins on all sides and 12 font size. The abstract should have a title but should not identify the author(s). Submissions are limited to 1 individual and 1 joint abstract per author.

Abstracts should be written in English, and must be submitted electronically only in PDF format to the following address: biolinguistics.bcngmail.com

The deadline for submission is May 23rd 2011.

Organizing Committee:

Víctor Acedo-Matellán (CLT-UAB)
Cedric Boeckx (ICREA & CLT-UAB)
Ángel J. Gallego (CLT-UAB)

Call for papers: Biolinguistics Workshop at 2012 LSA Annual Meeting

2011-03-14T07:23:00.000-07:00

In conjunction with the LSA Special Interest Group on Biolinguistics, we invite the submission of abstracts for a proposed Workshop on Biolinguistics at the 2012 LSA Annual Meeting (Portland, January 5-8). We invite abstracts on any aspect of the biolinguistic enterprise, keeping in mind that the Special Interest Group on Biolinguistics was founded in part to “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… and so on.”

Abstracts should be between 200-500 words and need not be anonymous. (The LSA reviews Workshop proposals non-anonymously.) Please, no more than one single-authored and one joint-authored abstract per person. All participants are required to be LSA members. However, anyone may submit an abstract, so long as they join the LSA if they ultimately present.

Please send abstracts, preferably in PDF format, by April 10, 2011 to:

Kleanthes Grohmann at kleanthi@ucy.ac.cy

Bridget Samuels at bridget@umd.edu

Biolinguistics videos

2011-03-05T19:21:00.000-08:00

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

Conference: EVOLANG

2011-02-15T06:37:00.000-08:00

Conference: EVOLANG
March 13-16, 2012
Kyoto, Japan
http://kyoto.evolang.org/

The 9th International Conference on the Evolution of Language invites substantive contributions relating to the evolution of human language. Submissions may be in any relevant discipline, including, but not limited to, anthropology, archeology, artificial life, biology, cognitive science, genetics, linguistics, modeling, paleontology, physiology, primatology, and psychology. Normal standards of academic excellence apply. Submitted papers should aim to make clear their own substantive claim, relating this to relevant scientific literature, and briefly setting out the method by which the claim is substantiated, the nature of the relevant data, and/or the core of the theoretical argument concerned. Submissions may be theory-based, but empirical studies should not rest on preliminary results.

TYPES OF SUBMISSION
Attendees are limited to one first-authored podium presentation and one first-authored poster per person. There is no limit on second-authored presentations or posters. There are two possible types of submission: Full Papers, which can have a length of between 6 and 8 pages, and Abstracts, which can be up to 2 pages long. All accepted submissions will be published in the proceedings of the conference in a bound volume. All papers or abstracts accepted will be allotted the same presentation length (probably 25 minutes plus 10 minutes discussion). In addition to podium presentations, a dedicated poster session will be held. There will be prizes for the best student presentation and the best poster (from any author); please see below. Please indicate whether your submission is to be considered for inclusion as a talk only, a poster only, or both. Submissions should be made via the conference website http://kyoto.evolang.org/.

PRIZES
The Hurford Prize, which is sponsored by Oxford University Press, is awarded at each Evolang conference to the best student presentation, as judged by the Evolang organising committee. The prize is 200GBP of OUP books.

The Interaction Studies Best Poster Prize is sponsored by John Benjamins. It is open to all, and includes a 200 euro cash award, and a year’s free subscription to Interaction Studies.

Submissions due: 15 August 2011 http://kyoto.evolang.org/
Acceptance notifications: 15 October 2011
Final versions due: 1 November 2011