Materials for the 2nd LaTeX session

Here you have the materials (presentation 2 and 1st and 2nd exercises) for the second LaTeX session given by Oriol Borrega and Pedro Tiago Martins.

You can download all the materials here.

LaTeX tutorial II from BiBcn

BIB Journal Club

On Monday, February 4, at 16:00, BIB will have a journal club session. We will discuss two papers: The first paper deals with the notion of emergence, while the second addresses the development of complexity in language. 

Your participation is welcome. See you all in the Sala de Reunions, 5th floor, Edifici Josep Carner, UB, at 16:00. 

Music and its Impact on the Body and the Mind

On Thursday, January 31, at 19:00, Steven Milthen (University of Reading) will give a talk on the origins of music, at Cosmocaixa Barcelona. This will be the first out of a series of events that will take place until June 4, under the coordination of Antoni Rodríguez-Fornells (ICREA-Universitat de Barcelona-IDIBELL).

You can find out more information about the events here.

Talk - Sergio Balari on "Computational Phenotypes"

On Tuesday, January 29, at 15:30, Sergio Balari (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) will present his recent book with Guillermo Lorenzo (University of Oviedo) "Computational Phenotypes: Towards an Evolutionary Developmental Biolinguistics".

The meeting place will be the Sala de Professors, 5th floor, Edifici Josep Carner, UB. See you lots there and please spread the word to anyone interested!

BIB Journal Club #1

On Monday, January 21, at 16:00, BIB will have its first journal club session. We will discuss Darwin’s Problem and Broca’s Problem, focusing on a recent paper that deals with the evolution of language and neural/brain architecture. 

We welcome your participation. See you all in the Sala de Reunions, 5th floor, Edifici Josep Carner, UB, at 16:00. 

BIB tutorials #4 -- "Introduction to LaTeX" [cont´d]

On Monday, January 21, February 4, and February 18, at 18:00, BIB members Oriol Borrega and Pedro Tiago Martins will give three tutorial sessions on LaTeX. Following the first introductory session for which the material is available here, the upcoming sessions will deal with:

• bibliography management, 
• document layout issues, 
• preparation of tables, images, and lists, 
• linguistic annotations (glosses, syntactic trees, phonetic transcriptions etc.),
• cross-references.

The meeting place will be the computers' room (4.4), Edifici Josep Carner, UB. Feel free to spread the word to anyone interested!

Laterality in Tarragona

There is a congress on Laterality in Tarragona (Spain), on February 11-13. The meeting is organized by Natalie Uomini (University of Liverpool) and Marina Lozano (Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social – IPHES). Speakers will present talks in anthropology, primatology, archaeology, paleontology, and cognitive sciences. Posters are welcome. The meeting will also include a visit to the Mona Foundation, a recovery centre for primates.

Reproduced from http://paleoneurology.wordpress.com/

Materials for the first LaTeX session

Here you have the materials (presentation and 1st exercise) for the first LaTeX session given by Pedro Tiago Martins and Oriol Borrega.

You can download all the materials here.

First LaTeX session of the BIB from BiBcn

Scope of Biolinguistics

There is a very thoughtful review of B. Samuels' book Phonological architecture: A biolinguistic perspective (Oxford Studies in Biolinguistics) 2) in the latest issue of the Journal of Linguistics.

The author of the review, D. Currie Hall, makes some very interesting point regarding the nature of biolinguistics. On another occasion, I will discuss his statement to the effect that "biolinguistics is a relatively new endeavour". Today, I want to focus on the question he raises half-way through the review: "What does it mean to pursue a biolinguistic approach to phonology, or to language in general?" Daniel is right in saying that "In one sense, it means that the field of inquiry becomes broader." As he writes, "Some phonological patterns find an explanation in the interface conditions of syntax, others in the neurophysiological underpinnings of mammalian auditory perception. A successful biophonologist must know enough about both of these things, and many others, to be able to make reasonable inferences about what each of them contributes."

On the other hand, "In another sense, the central object of study becomes much smaller. If some of phonology is really syntax, and some of it is really phonetics, then relatively little of phonology is phonology." This is where biolinguistics meets (some kind of) minimalism, and it is also where biolinguistics really departs from philology-oriented projects (among which, many modern formal/theoretical studies).

Biolinguistics done seriously (i.e., with an equal dose of 'ling' and 'bio') really calls for a redefinition of the subject matter of grammar (syntax, phonology, semantics, etc).

--Cedric Boeckx

BIB tutorials #4 -- "Introduction to LaTeX"

On Monday, Jan 14, 19:00-21:00, BIB members Oriol Borrega and Pedro Tiago Martins will give the first of four tutorial sessions on LaTeX, a typesetting system for writing high-quality technical and scientific documents such as papers, reports, theses and books. Because of the quality of the documents it produces and also the ease and versatility with which it manages references, LaTeX has been the de facto standard in several scientific fields for years and is now enjoying a growth of popularity among academics in general.

This first session will be about the fundamentals of LaTeX and its advantages when compared to word processors. No previous knowlege of LaTeX is assumed. By the end of the session, participants will have learned  what LaTeX is and how it works. They will also be given a little exercise that will allow them to produce a simple, nice-looking document, with more to be explored in the subsequent sessions. 

The meeting place will be the computers' room (4.4) at Edifici Josep Carner, UB. See you all at 19:00 and feel free to spread the word to anyone interested!