Habemus website

Thanks to the hard work of BIB members Oriol Borrega and Celia Alba, BIB has a brand new website, which can be viewed here. More content will be added in the very near future, and we welcome any comment viewers might have.

Talk -- Juan Manuel Toro

On Thursday, May 23, at 16.00, Juan Manuel Toro (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) will give a talk on "When language is bad for you: Animals outperform humans in a rule learning task".

Abstract: Extensive research with human adults and infants suggests it is difficult to learn simple rules over consonants, but not over vowels. Nevertheless, the source of this difficulty is unknown. In a series of studies, we tested rats’ capacity to generalize rules implemented over vowels and consonants. In Experiment 1, rats were trained to discriminate CVCVCV nonsense words in which vowels followed an AAB structure in half of the words and an ABC structure in the other half, whereas consonants were combined randomly. In Experiment 2, rules were implemented over the consonants and vowels varied at random. In the test phase of both experiments eight new test words were presented. Following the presentation of each AAB or ABC word lever-pressing responses were registered and food was delivered. We found that rats could learn the rules and generalize them to new tokens over both vowels and consonants. Using exactly the same materials, humans only learned the rule over the vowels. Our results support the hypothesis that linguistic representations constrain the operation of rule learning mechanisms. Lacking such representations, animals easily learn rules that are difficult for humans.

The meeting place will be the Sala de Professors, 5th floor, Edifici Josep Carner, UB. Feel free to spread the word to anyone interested!

Upcoming MA Course -- Boeckx, Hinzen

Course Description: Advanced Issues in Cognitive Science and Linguistics (May 2013)

Part I: Issues in Biolinguistics

Cedric Boeckx

Description: This lecture/seminar series is meant to provide an introduction to current (fundamental) issues in "biolinguistics", giving you a sense of what biolinguistics is, how it came about, and what it intends to achieve. Although clearly related to, and often conflated with generative linguistics, biolinguistics requires -- or so I will argue -- a significant rethinking of the practice of theoretical linguistics, but also its conceptual foundation; a necessary step, I believe, to move from a cognitive science to a cognitive bioscience.

I will take for granted some of the major concepts of modern linguistics, those discussed in the first two parts of my 2010 Language in Cognition book (Wiley). I will also assume basic familiarity with concepts like "FLN", "FLB", "three factors of language design", "I-language", etc. If you are not familiar at all with these, please read up before the lectures. If you are very motivated, you may want to read classics like Lenneberg's (1967) Biological Foundations of Language, Piattelli-Palmarini's (1980) Language and Learning, and Chomsky's (1980) Rules and Representations before class.

Topics to be discussed include:

-the characterization of the "language-ready brain"

-genetic regulation of the language capacity

-(deep and surface) variation within the language faculty

-language, thought, and externalization

-potential critiques of the enterprise

Assessment: class participation and a 5-page essay on a topic to be discussed at the beginning of the first meeting.

Part II: Form and meaning in grammar

Wolfram Hinzen

Description: Starting from Chapter 4, paragraph 1 of Chomsky's Aspects (1965), we will revisit and redraw the boundaries of syntax and semantics. This will be in line with recent work on an 'Un-'-Cartesian linguistics, which challenges traditional Cartesian conceptions of the interface between language and thought. On the view I will develop over these five lectures/seminars, the central principles of sapiens-specific thought fall out from the organisation of grammar, and we heuristically assume that everything in grammar is interpretable, crucially including Case and phi-features.

Schedule:

1.What is (Un-) Cartesian Linguistics?
2.The grammar of nominal and clausal reference
3.The interpretability of Person
4.The interpretability of Case
5.Language and reality

Preliminary readings:

Chomsky (1965), Aspects, ch.4, par.1.
Chomsky (1966), Cartesian Linguistics, chs. 1-2 (background)
Hinzen (2012), Language and thought, in Boeckx (ed.), Handbook of Linguistic Minimalism, OUP.
Examination: A number of sample questions will be posted on which short essays can then be written.

The meeting place for Monday-Thursday is the Aula Gabriel Oliver, floor -1, Josep Carner building. For Friday, the meeting place is the Sala de Professors, 5th floor, Josep Carner building. More information about the time of the course is available here.

Talk -- Anne Reboul

On Thursday, May 2, at 17.00, Anne Reboul (L2C2, CNRS, Lyons) will give a talk on "The many problems of social accounts of the evolution of language".

Abstract: Since Pinker & Bloom´s paper in 1990, accounts of the evolution of language have multiplied. Some of them take language to be biological (to be a biological adaptation), but quite a few of them take it to be cultural (to be a cultural adaptation). A few propose that language is not an adaptation, but rather the exaptation of previous existing features that adapted under various selection pressures, having nothing to do with communication as such. Among those who see language as an adaptation, on either a biological or a cultural scenario, the currently trendy approaches are in terms of "social", though often fairly ill defined, notions such as cooperation or social cohesion.

Taking as my main examples, Dunbar's (1996, 2004) biological theory and Tomasello's (1999, 2008, 2009) cultural theory, I will argue that social accounts of language evolution are unable to account for the central feature of language, i.e. its generativity or creativity. This is the problem of content. It is directly linked to a second problem, which is that social accounts of language ignore the distinction between I-language and E-language, concentrating on E-language, which means that they basically are unable to correctly address the central problem of language acquisition. Finally, even supposing for the sake of argument that social accounts of language evolution are viable, the emphasis on "cooperation", "sharing", etc. seem misguided in at least two ways: first, they rest on a misunderstanding of the Gricean notion of cooperation; second, the universality of implicit communication (conversational implicatures and presuppositions), if anything, argues for a manipulative rather than a cooperative view of human communication.

The meeting place will be the Gabriel Oliver Room, -1 floor, Edifici Josep Carner, UB. 

BIB Journal Club

On Tuesday, April 30, at 16:30, BIB will have a journal club session. We will discuss work, presented by Gillian Ramchand and Peter Svenonius in GLOW 36, that derives the functional hierarchy aiming to reconcile mainstream Minimalist views on Universal Grammar with the fine-grained hierarchies that the cartographic enterprise proposes.

Feel free to spread the word and see you all in the Sala de Reunions, 5th floor, Edifici Josep Carner, UB.

LaTeX course (4th session)

Join BIB!

All BIB talks, journal club sessions, courses offered by BIB members and all other activities announced  here are open to the public. Everybody is welcome to attend them! If you would like to be informed about upcoming activities via email, please get in touch with us stating your interest and we will keep you posted.