Linguistics Colloquium
Jim Hurford of the University of Edinburgh will speak at the UCSD Linguistics Department Colloquium on February 8, 2010, at 2:00 pm in AP&M 4301.
Jim Hurford
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