Location:
Seminar Area Genetics

Contact:
Viola Mittag
phone + 49 (0) 341 3550 500

E-mail: mittag[>>> Please replace the brackets with an AT sign! <<<]eva.mpg.de
Website: http://www.eva.mpg.de/genetics

Location:
MPI-EVA, Lecture hall, 2nd floor

Abstract:

• 14:00 Stephen C. Levinson: Evolution, language diversity and 'the interaction engine'


• 15:30 Discussion and (soft) drinks just outside the lecture hall

Contents: Aside from complexity, from a comparative perspective the crucial hallmark of human communication is language diversity: languages differ, sometimes radically, at every level. Using bioinformatic methods, it can be shown that this diversity is relatively unconstrained. Similar methods promise to allow us to reach back into the Pleistocene and help us reconstruct the human diaspora, but they also raise questions about whether current language diversity has a still deeper time depth.
Diversity implies that language is a biocultural hybrid, which in turn presupposes a biological base. Part of that infrastructure is the vocal tract, and part is a peculiar communicative ethology, which I dub the 'interaction engine'. I'll report on recent work on one aspect of this ethology, turn-taking in conversation, which provides interesting insight into the processing of language, into the underlying biology, and the interaction between a fixed system of usage and the variable form of languages.
These strands of investigation converge to suggest some speculations on the evolution of language: (a) modern human language has a much deeper ancestry than usually thought, perhaps going back to the common ancestor of modern humans and neandertals; (b) there may have been ancient reservoirs of linguistic diversity in Eurasia before the modern human diaspora; (c) the distinctive ethology of human communication may have a much deeper ancestry than modern spoken language.

Click here for some information on Stephen C. Levinson as well as a list of his publications.

The series featuring external speakers takes place roughly every two months on Friday early afternoons and is followed by a "happy hour". The committee organizing the seminar series consists of: Tobias Deschner, Wolfgang Enard, Paul Heggarty, Tracy Kivell, Federico Rossano and Sandra Jacob. Please contact any of them with comments or suggestions.

Contact:
Sandra Jacob, -122 or -156

E-mail: instituteseminar[>>> Please replace the brackets with an AT sign! <<<]eva.mpg.de

Location:
U2.50

Contact:
Nadin Eckhardt

E-mail: eckhardt[>>> Please replace the brackets with an AT sign! <<<]eva.mpg.de

Location:
U 2.50

Contact:
Nadin Eckhardt

E-mail: eckhardt[>>> Please replace the brackets with an AT sign! <<<]eva.mpg.de

Location:
University of Leipzig, downtown campus

Contact:
ALT 10 Organizing Committee
Department of Linguistics
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6
04103 Leipzig
Germany

E-mail: ALT10[>>> Please replace the brackets with an AT sign! <<<]eva.mpg.de
Website: http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/conference/2013_ALT10/

Location:
Seminar room H 4.10 / H 4.11 (4th floor, on top of the lecture hall)

Contact:
Claudia Büchel
phone + 49 (0) 341 3550 300
fax + 49 (0) 341 3550 333

E-mail: buechel[>>> Please replace the brackets with an AT sign! <<<]eva.mpg.de
Website: http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/conference/2013_talking_neolithic/index.html