Protolang 2

The UK Cognitive Linguistics Conference will be hosted at the University of Birmingham next year, July 27 to 30. This interdisciplinary conference is focused on the intersection between language and cognition, and it accepts submissions from all areas of linguistics, including experimental and computational research on language evolution, language origins, iconicity, and cognitive and functional approaches to historical linguistics.
The plenary speakers for this conference include Adele Goldberg (Princeton University), Caroline Rowland (MPI Nijmegen), Mark Dingemanse (Radboud University) and Gabriella Vigliocco (University College London).

The call for papers is online, with a December 30 deadline for 500 word abstracts.

Besides submitting to the main session, the conference organizers welcome proposals for pre-conference workshops, which can be skills-based workshops lead by single researchers or teams of researchers, as well as series of talks by different researchers on specific topics.

Next year at EvoLang, I’m doing a short session on public engagement in Language Evolution. As part of this, I have been given a small part of the poster session to have a little exhibition/discussion corner about public engagement initiatives. As such, I am now recruiting contributions that outline existing initiatives. Contributions will use the 2-page EvoLang template (available here: https://www.evolang.org/submissions). Contributions should outline the initiative and make clear:

• The objective(s) for the public engagement initiative
• Reflections on success and areas for improvement
• Good practice to be learnt from these reflections

Contributions will be reviewed in relation to space constraints, but I hope to have a good diversity of examples. Please email contributions to hannah.little@uwe.ac.uk before January 3rd 2020. Questions to the same address.

More context of the session is below:

Public engagement has always been an important aspect of academia. Breaking the barrier between research and the public can foster knowledge, equality, trust and accountability. On a more pragmatic level, funders increasingly require impact statements and plans for public dissemination. However, language evolution as a field has unique difficulties meeting these demands.

Evolutionary linguistics is difficult to explain to those outside the field. Much research presented at EvoLang has implications for our knowledge of human origins, but the implications for current and future humans often remain unclear, creating a “relevance gap”. Further, the abstractness of research based on models (computational or experimental) and not referring to concrete artefacts, fossils or living examples, creates another barrier for explanation. Since EvoLang started, many researchers have undertaken public engagement initiatives that address this relevance gap in different ways. 

In this session, we will explore existing and future objectives for public engagement with language evolution research. We will discuss ways to frame language evolution to make it accessible to the public, and present examples of good practice, as well as lessons to be learnt, from previous and ongoing public engagement initiatives.

Initiatives will be split into 2 sections, mirroring two (non comprehensive) models for public engagement: deficit and participation (Trench, 2008).

The deficit model sees the public as having a knowledge deficit and seeks to fix that through one-way communication. Typical examples are documentaries (e.g. Through the Wormhole episode “How do Aliens Think”, Sayenga, 2013) and science journalism (e.g. Babel Magazine, Little, 2018). Discussion within the session will focus on good practice around creating relevant and intuitive explanations for concepts within language evolution.

The participation model works on the principle that all participants in a public engagement initiative can contribute, and that all have a stake in the outcome. Many public engagement initiatives in language evolution have recruited members of the public as participants in data-collection exercises at public events including festivals (e.g. Verhoef et al., 2015), science centres and museums (e.g. Cluskley, 2018; Raviv & Arnon, 2018), or as games (e.g. The Color Game, Morin et al., 2018). While involvement as an experimental participant is a contribution, it does not necessarily create a sense of having a stake in the outcome, or even understanding the outcome. Therefore one of the key aspects of the session will be discussing good practice for increasing public understanding around these initiatives.

As a result of the submissions, a collaborative review paper of initiatives and best practice for public engagement in language evolution may be produced for submission to the Journal of Language Evolution. If you’d like to contribute to this, but cannot contribute to the session, please email me on hannah.little@uwe.ac.uk

References

Cuskley, C. (2018). Alien symbols for alien language: iterated learning in a unique, novel signal space. In The Evolution of Language: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference (EVOLANGXII). Ed. by C. Cuskley et al. NCU Press. doi (Vol. 10, No. 12775, pp. 3991-1).

Kirby, S., Perman, T. & St John, R. (2017) Sing the Gloaming. Galloway Dark Sky Park, Scotland.

Little, H. (2018) “Babel on 5”. Babel: The Language Magazine, Issue 23. Page 42-44.

Morin, O., Winters, J., Müller, T. F., Morisseau, T., Etter, C., & Greenhill, S. J. (2018). What smartphone apps may contribute to language evolution research. Journal of Language Evolution, 3(2), 91-93.

Raviv, L., & Arnon, I. (2018). Systematicity, but not compositionality: Examining the emergence of linguistic structure in children and adults using iterated learning. Cognition, 181, 160-173.

Sayenga, K. (Producer). (2013). Through the Wormhole [Television series]. Revelations Entertainment.

Trench, B. (2008). Towards an analytical framework of science communication models. In Communicating science in social contexts (pp. 119-135). Springer, Dordrecht.

Verhoef, T., Roberts, S. G., & Dingemanse, M. (2015). Emergence of systematic iconicity: transmission, interaction and analogy.

Recently I was fortunate enough to go out to Morocco for the launch of a brand new school of Collective Intelligence:

If the launch was anything to go by, it’s going to be a pretty awesome to place to live and work, which brings me to four exciting opportunities for potential professors in data science, social computing, developmental psychology, and cognitive science:

The University Mohammed VI Polytechnic (Ben Guerir, Morocco) is recruiting one to three professors of cognitive sciences for October 2019 (at the earliest) […]

The recruited professors will divide their time between teaching (max. 3 courses per year), basic research, and applied research, in varying proportions depending on the position. Teaching will be in English or French.

Below are links to each of the positions (.docx) with more information.

The University of Birmingham and the Department of English Language and Linguisticsare proud to host the 7th UK Cognitive Linguistics Association Conference from 28 – 30 July 2020 at the University of Birmingham.

The conference welcomes contributions from all fields of cognitive linguistics, as well as from related fields more broadly concerned with language and cognition. We aim to cover a wide range of research including, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Functional and usage-based approaches to language
• Cognitive grammar and construction grammar
• Cognitive/constructionist approaches to linguistic diversity and typology
• Metaphor, metonymy, blends and other forms of figurative language
• Cognitive semantics and frame semantics
• Prototypes and categorization
• Cognitive discourse analysis
• Cognitive pragmatics
• Cognitive semiotics
• Cognitive approaches to historical linguistics
• Language evolution
• Language acquisition
• Experimental semantics and pragmatics
• Sign language research
• Linguistic relativity
• Language and space
• Language and perception
• Gesture and multimodality
• Iconicity
• Embodied cognition and situated cognition

Cognitive linguistics is by definition highly interdisciplinary, and so in addition to primarily linguistic research, we also invite language related submissions that are based on disciplines such as (cognitive and social) psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, anthropology, biology, artificial intelligence, and discourse and communication studies.

Talks will be 20 minutes plus 10 minutes for questions and discussion. There will also be a poster session.

The language of the conference is English.

Participants will be allowed to present at most one talk (as a single or first author) and one poster. However, there is no restriction on the number of co-authored papers. Upon submission, you will be asked to indicate if you intend the submission for a talk or a poster

Abstracts of no more than 500 words (excluding references) should be submitted using EasyChair. The link will be communicated in due course. 

The Call for Papers will be open from September 2019 until December 30, 2019​

If you require a BSL interpreter, please get in contact with the organisers. 

All abstracts will be subject to double-blind peer review by an international scientific committee (and should therefore not contain author names).

More info on the website here: https://www.ukclc2020.com/