'After several decades in scientific purgatory, language evolution has reclaimed its place as one of the most important branches in linguistics, and it is increasingly recognized as one of the most crucial sources of evidence for understanding human cognition.'
The annual conference of the Linguistic Society of Belgium (BKL-CBL), organized in cooperation with the Evolutionary Linguistics Association, is to be held at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) on 8 June 2015. The abstract submission deadline is 29 May 2015.
'After several decades in scientific purgatory, language evolution has reclaimed its place as one of the most important branches in linguistics, and it is increasingly recognized as one of the most crucial sources of evidence for understanding human cognition. This renewed interest is accompanied by exciting breakthroughs in the science of language. Historical linguists can now couple their expertise to powerful methods for retrieving and documenting which changes have taken place. At the same time, construction grammar is increasingly being embraced in all areas of linguistics as a fruitful way of making sense of all these empirical observations. Construction grammar has also enthused formal and computational linguists, who have developed sophisticated tools for exploring issues in language processing and learning, and how new forms of grammar may emerge in speech populations.'
'Separately, linguists and computational linguists can therefore explain which changes take place in language and how these changes are possible. When working together, however, they can also address the question of why language evolves over time and how it emerged in the first place.'
This year, the BKL-CBL conference brings together top researchers from both fields to put evidence and methods from both perspectives on the table, and to take up the challenge of uniting these efforts.
Keynote speakers are Graeme Trousdale (University of Edinburgh), Luc Steels (VUB/ IBE Barcelona), Kristin Davidse (University of Leuven), Peter Petré (University of Lille) and Arie Verhagen (University of Leiden).
The abstract submission deadline is 29 May 2015.
http://ai.vub.ac.be/bkl-2015
http://www.bkl-cbl.be/