LINGUIST List 21.2383 Fri May 28 2010 Confs: Bioling, Anthro Ling/UK Editor for this issue: Amy Brunett <brunettlinguistlist.org> LINGUIST is pleased to announce the launch of an exciting new feature: Easy Abstracts! Easy Abs is a free abstract submission and review facility designed to help conference organizers and reviewers accept and process abstracts online. Just go to: http://www.linguistlist.org/confcustom, and begin your conference customization process today! With Easy Abstracts, submission and review will be as easy as 1-2-3! Directory         1.    Monica Tamariz, Language as an Evolutionary System: A Multidisciplinary Approach Message 1: Language as an Evolutionary System: A Multidisciplinary Approach Date: 28-May-2010 From: Monica Tamariz <monicaling.ed.ac.uk> Subject: Language as an Evolutionary System: A Multidisciplinary Approach E-mail this message to a friend Language as an Evolutionary System: A Multidisciplinary Approach Date: 12-Jul-2010 - 13-Jul-2010 Location: Edinburgh, United Kingdom Contact: Monica Tamariz Contact Email: monicaling.ed.ac.uk Meeting URL: http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~monica/LES Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics Other Specialty: Biolinguistics Meeting Description: These two days of talks and discussion will bring together scholars from a range of disciplines to discuss the value of applying evolutionary thinking to the cultural evolution of language. Linguistics has traditionally been cautious of analogies between evolution in language an in biology. Common ancestry and descent were proposed earlier for languages than for biological species, but while biological evolution has flourished into a science with solid theories that generate testable hypothesis, the study of the cultural evolution of language -- evolution that is independent of changes in the human genome - is only beginning to test theories. McMahon (1994) concluded that the way forward is Darwinian thinking. Since then, a number of independent proposals (e.g. Croft, 2000; Ritt, 2003; Mufwene, 2001, 2008; Nettle, 1999) have convergently applied explicit analogies with the elements and processes of the evolutionary synthesis (Mayr & Provine, 1998) to cultural language dynamics. They all assume that language evolution and change are caused by cultural mechanisms such as social transmission and language usage in context. Recent convergent theoretical and methodological advances in evolutionary linguistics, archaeology and anthropology suggest that language is one aspect of culture that can be studied using theories and methods also applied to other cultural phenomena. Historical linguistics' phylogenetic methods (see a modern approach in McMahon & McMahon, 2005), have been adopted in archaeology and anthropology (Lipo et al., 2006). Agent-based computer simulations, mathematical models and evolutionary game theory have been used to explore the cultural evolution of language and of socio-cognitive requirements for culture, such as cooperation, imitation or conformity (Boyd & Richerson, 2005). Memetics (Dennett, 1995; Aunger, 2000) proposes that memes (Dawkins, 1975), the cultural analogues to genes, evolve in an environment that includes humans and other memes. Sperber (1995) has strongly argued against memetics by claiming that cultural transmission is essentially transformational, and there is no true replication in culture. Summing up, this workshop is concerned with how Darwinian thinking can be applied to the cultural evolution of language. A multidisciplinary collection of contributions form the fields of linguistics, psychology, biology and philosophy will help construct a clearer picture of the state of this field. Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue Page Updated: 28-May-2010       About LINGUIST    |   Contact Us       While the LINGUIST List makes every effort to ensure the linguistic relevance of sites listed on its pages, it cannot vouch for their contents.