[PLing] Damian Blasi @CEU (virtual and in Budapest)

[Eva Wittenberg]

Dear All,

The CEU Department of Cognitive Science invites you to the following talk:
Please note that this event will be held at CEU Budapest site!

Speaker: Damian Blasi (Harvard University)

Language diversity from individual-level biases

In this talk I’ll critically revisit the idea that individual-level biases shape language diversity. The idea is straightforward: the distribution of language structures in the world approximately follows the marginal payoff they provide to humans, in the form of ease of production, learnability, expressivity, and the like. I will discuss a number of cases from across linguistic domains but will ultimately focus on the role of learnability (as evidenced in individual-level experiments). In this regard there are multiple related hypotheses, including the notions that language structures which are (1) easier to acquire by children, (2) easier to acquire by adults and (3) easier to retain by adults, are overrepresented across the world’s languages. The main evidence I’ll use is the history and the nature of languages which instantiate almost ideal case studies for each of the hypotheses described above, accordingly: (1) Creole languages (Blasi, Michaelis & Haspelmath 2017 Nat Hum Beh), (2) languages spoken by large populations (Scherbakova et al. to appear in Sci Adv), and (3) surviving languages (i.e. languages that are no longer transmitted to newer generations, Blasi et al. in prep). I will conclude that the evidence for a direct pipeline between individual-level biases and social-level language structures is surprisingly less robust than widely assumed across the cognitive and language sciences, and I will discuss some future research directions.


Date: Wednesday, Dec 6, 2023

Time: 4 PM (to 5:30 PM) CET

Venue: CEU BUDAPEST site (1051 Budapest, Nádor u. 15.) N13 room 118.*
and Zoom (meeting ID: 977 8672 8334<https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/97786728334?pwd=SXpVTkM2eFJsTUZTQU96dVVVTzFwZz09>, passcode: 425757)

Chair: Eva Wittenberg


*Anyone not affiliated with CEU wishing to attend in-person in Budapest must RSVP to vargai at ceu.edu to get access to the lecture hall.



Eva Wittenberg

lcl.ceu.edu<http://lcl.ceu.edu>

Department of Cognitive Science
Central European University
Quellenstr. 51, 1100 Wien, Austria
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