Accessibility statement

Workshop on Language Variation and Change and Cultural Evolution

Friday 14 November 2014, 9.45AM to 3.00pm

The Departments of Language and Linguistic Science and of Computer Science are pleased to announce a workshop to be held the afternoon of Thursday 13 November and the morning / early afternoon of Friday 14 November. Speakers will present talks addressing the following questions:

  1. How can the mechanisms of language variation through time and space be investigated and computationally modelled?
  2. What does the attested scope of language diversity tell us about the formation, history and movements of different populations, cultures and societies?
  3. To what extent does variation in language correlate with variation in other cultural or biological features of human societies?

Programme

Thursday afternoon 13 November (Venue: ARC/014)
3.00pm Aaron Ecay (Pennsylvania, York) and Susan Pintzuk (York)
Corpora Past, Present and Future
3.55pm Cristina Guardiano (Reggio Emilia) and Giuseppe Longobardi (York)
Linguistics, Genetics and the Structure of Europe
4.50pm Break
5.05pm Gerhard Jäger (Tübingen),
Which phylogenetic method works best? And what are those trees good for anyway?
7.00pm Dinner at The Plough (48 Main Street, Fulford, York)
If you would like to join us, please send email to Susan Pintzuk (susan.pintzuk@york.ac.uk) before Monday 10 November 5pm.
Friday morning 14 November (Venue: ARC/014)
9.45am Dunstan Brown (York)
Incipient Syntactic Relevance: The Russian Second Locative
10.45am David Lightfoot (Georgetown)
Triggers and the Biology of Variation
11.45am Lunch
Friday afternoon 14 November (Venue: ATB/056 & ­057)
1.00pm Dimitar Kazakov (York)
Interplay between Navigation, Cooperation and Communication
2.00pm Monica-­Alexandrina Irimia, Dimitris Michelioudakis and Nina Radkevich (York)
Variation in Genitive Case: The Pronominal Strategy

Organisers:
Dimitar Kazakov (Department of Computer Science)
Giuseppe Longobardi (Department of Language and Linguistic Science)
Susan Pintzuk (Department of Language and Linguistic Science)

We gratefully acknowledge funding from the Research Priming Fund of the University of York, with additional contributions from Giuseppe Longobardi's ERC-funded research project LanGeLin, the Departments of Computer Science and Language and Linguistic Science, the Centre for Linguistic History and Diversity, the Artificial Intelligence Group and the Human Computer Interaction Group of the Department of Computer Science, and the York Centre for Complex Systems Analysis.

Location: ARC/014 and ATB/056 & 057