The Edinburgh Lectures in Language Evolution are an annual series of talks hosted by the Centre for Language Evolution. Each year, we welcome distinguished visiting speakers to deliver lectures summarising their research, sharing their thoughts on where the field is headed, and what exciting breakthroughs are yet to come.
This years’ talk series is presented in partnership with the UK Research and Innovation Centre for Doctoral Training in Natural Language Processing, and the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics.
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Registration
You can register for the Lectures by providing us with your email address. Links to the Zoom webinars will only be shared with attendees who have given us their email address. The talks will also be live-streamed to YouTube for public viewing and will be available to watch at a later date.
Dates and details
This year, we will be welcoming four speakers on four consecutive Wednesdays (30th October to 20th November). All talks take place at 4pm GMT (5pm CET, 11am EST, 8am PST).
- Shira Tal (University of Edinburgh) on 30th October
- Cat Hobaiter (University of St Andrews) on 6th November
- Richard Futrell (UC Davis) on 13th November
- Martin Haspelmath (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology) on 20th November
In 2024, the Lectures will take place in-person in Edinburgh and virtually via Zoom Webinar. Each event will begin with a lecture by each invited speaker followed by a panel discussion featuring all four speakers, after which the audience will be invited to join the conversation during a Q&A session.
30th October: Shira Tal
Shira’s research focuses on how our cognition shapes and is shaped by language structure. She approaches her research from a developmental perspective, by examining how children differ from adults in the way they learn and use language. Based on insights from this research she explores how these behavioural differences, in turn, affect the overall structure of linguistic typology. Shira completed her PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2021 and joined Edinburgh University as a Postdoc later that same year. In 2024, she was made a Chanceller’s Fellow at Edinburgh University and is now a core faculty member in the Centre for Language Evolution.
Chanceller’s Fellow at The University of Edinburgh
Website: https://sites.google.com/view/shiratal/
Talk details
The developmental trajectory of cognitive biases impacting language change
6th November: Cat Hobaiter
Cat is a field primatologist who has spent the past 20-years living with and studying wild primates across Africa. She did her undergraduate at the University of Edinburgh, before moving to the University of St Andrews for her PhD to explore the gestural communication of wild chimpanzees, and never leaving. She is now a Professor in Origins of Mind there and PI of the Wild Minds Lab. She still spends around half the year in the field, and heads a team of researchers exploring the behaviour and cognition of wild apes and more. Her work explores what the communication of wild apes living in their natural environment tells us about the ways they think, and about the origins of our own behaviour. She leads ape field sites in Uganda and Guinea and serves on expert groups for the UN and IUCN.
Professor in Origins of Mind at the University of St Andrews
Social: @nakedprimate on twitter, bluesky, and insta
Website: www.wildminds.ac.uk
Talk details
Reimagining the study of great ape communication
In the Wild Minds Lab our work explores the communication and cognition of wild apes and other species. Like most researchers interested in the communication of other species, we explore the different signals great apes use, asking questions such as, how do they combine them? And, what do they mean? At the end of the day, we do this because we are interested in what it means to be a chimpanzee, or a gorilla, or a human. And systems of communication give us a framework through which we can investigate what individuals of other species, and our own, are thinking and feeling. But—to date—the ways in which we have studied communication, asking what tools each species has in their tool kit, might not be well suited to understanding how communication is used by individuals, groups, and cultures across species. I will describe how we are reimagining the study of non-human communication, re-building the units of communication from the bottom-up and taking a species-centric perspective to parsing them, as well as integrating social context and relationships. We hope this will help us to better understand communicative structures in other species, and—in turn—the evolutionary origins of our own.
13th November: Richard Futrell
Richard Futrell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Language Science at the University of California, Irvine. He got his PhD in Cognitive Science at MIT working with Ted Gibson and Roger Levy. His research takes an information-theoretic approach to understanding the fundamental properties of human language and language processing in humans and machines.
Associate Professor at University of California, Irvine
Website: https://sites.socsci.uci.edu/~rfutrell/
Talk details
Memory and Locality in Language
I argue that human language is shaped by the information processing constraints on real-time language processing. One way these limits reveal themselves is in our tendency to keep related words close together in a sentence. Drawing on data from over 55 languages, I show evidence for this “dependency locality,” where syntactically related words tend to appear near each other. I then introduce a more advanced model of language processing, which combines incremental probabilistic prediction with memory constraints. This model leads to a broader concept called “information locality,” which I show can explain patterns like the order of adjectives across languages. Finally, I propose a general way to measure memory usage in sequential prediction, and present corpus studies showing that phonological forms and morphological paradigms across languages are structured in a way that reduces this memory usage.
20th November: Martin Haspelmath
Martin Haspelmath is a comparative linguist who studies the diversity of the world’s grammatical and lexical systems and tries to understand what is universal about them. After studies in Vienna, Cologne, Buffalo and Moscow, he received his PhD from FU Berlin and was a postdoc at the Universities of Bamberg and Pavia, before joining the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig in 1998. He taught at summer schools in diverse places such as Amherst, Berkeley, Campobasso, Canberra, Chicago, Como, MIT, Paris-Sorbonne, and Roscoff. In recent years, the focus of his work has been on the conceptual foundations of comparative and diachronic grammar, always with an eye to the cultural evolution of language systems.
Senior research scientist at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Website: https://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/staff/martin-haspelmath/
Talk details
Universals of language and convergent diachronic evolution
While linguists have long been interested in macro-evolutionary trends in the diachrony of grammatical patterns (e.g. Schleicher 1850; Müller 1864), research on universals of language structure became prominent only in the 1960s (e.g. Greenberg 1963; Croft 1990). But how do language universals relate to trends in diachronic change? There are two competing views that have recently been contrasted (e.g. Haspelmath 2019; Cristofaro 2019): On the one hand, it has been argued that many synchronic universals are due to constraints on diachronic change (e.g. Anderson 2005), so that the true universals are diachronic (Bybee 2006). On the other hand, it has been argued that language universals (like cultural universals more generally, e.g. Brown 2004) are the result of convergent cultural evolution. As language change is very slow and often not more than random drift (or even dysfunctional, Enke et al. 2024), it is difficult to provide evidence for either of these two views. However, I will discuss a range of different considerations that favour the view of universals as resulting from convergent diachronic evolution.