Languages are powerful solutions to the complex coordination problems that arise between social agents. They provide stable, shared expectations about how the words we say correspond to the beliefs and intentions in our heads. However, to handle an ever-changing environment with new things to talk about and new partners to talk with, linguistic knowledge must […]

The rise of gesture studies as its own field of inquiry has had a number of spin-off effects. For the field of linguistics, the implications have been both methodological and theoretical. Cognitive linguists initially fulfilled their claims to a usage-based approach through analyses of written corpora. What new questions of language use do we confront […]

Ethnicity has been a long-standing factor in the study of language variation, and there has been great interest in the role of ethnic minorities in language change. In Australia, we are in an ideal position to address this thanks to foundational work conducted by Barbara Horvath in the 1970s and 1980s, on the English of […]

Social media platforms have given the opportunity to users to publish content and express their opinions online in a very fast and easy way. The ease of posting content online and the anonymity of social media have increased the amount of harmful content that is published. After an introduction of online harmful information including definitions […]

Theoretical linguistics postulates abstract structures that successfully explain key aspects of language, such as semantic meaning. However, the precise relation between abstract theoretical ideas and empirical data from language use is not always straightforward. I propose to empirically test abstract semantic theories through the lens of probabilistic pragmatic modeling using statistical model comparison of theory-driven […]

In my talk, I bring together two research strands that rarely interact and might even seem incommensurable, namely sociolinguistic approaches to linguistic fluidity and multi-competence on the one hand, and structural approaches to linguistic coherence and grammatical systems on the other hand. Current sociolinguistics approaches typically take a perspective of language as a fluid and […]

The study of language has relied (to a varying degree) on the patterns of worldwide linguistic diversity. However, language structures and linguistic lineages are not ideally distributed in space and time: we have too many of a few and too few (or nothing) of many. Hence, it is not surprising that researchers try to either […]

Nas línguas naturais, certas estruturas tendem a ser usadas para certas funções, e certas funções tendem a ser codificadas por certas estruturas. Além disso, a investigação tipológica mostra uma relação de princípio entre estrutura e função, mais facilmente observada nos processos de gramaticalização (DeLancey 2001). O objetivo desta mesa é oferecer explicações funcionalistas de fenômenos […]

What are the social, environmental, and cognitive pressures that shape the evolution of language in our species? Why are there so many different languages in the world? And how did this astonishing linguistic diversity come about? These are some of the most interesting questions in the fields of cognitive science and linguistics, and represent the […]

At first glance, the monkey brain looks like a smaller version of the human brain. Indeed, the anatomical and functional architecture of the cortical auditory system in monkeys is very similar to that of humans, with dual pathways segregated into a ventral and a dorsal processing stream. Yet, monkeys do not speak. Repeated attempts to […]