Call for papers
Human language structure—including contents of the lexicon, morphosyntactic rules, and phonological forms—arises under internal and external pressures. Among internal pressures, previous work has uncovered how various aspects of cognitive endowment (e.g., universal grammar, language of thought, geometry of cognitive representations), memory constraints and learnability constraints may be shaping language structure. Among external pressures, various aspects of communicative efficiency (e.g., communicative precision, simplicity of utterances), as well as constraints pertaining to language change and language contact have been argued to be relevant. Recent work has brought to light new empirical generalizations on cross-linguistic similarities and differences in need of explanation. Furthermore, new methodologies coming from multiple disciplines (linguistics, cognitive psychology, computer science) have enabled modeling different pressures and evaluating to what extent they can explain cross-linguistics similarities and differences in language structure.
We aim to gather a workshop to showcase this exciting new work, as well as to invite broader reflection on its implications for the study of human language and cognition more generally.
We invite theoretical, experimental and/or computational work on topics that include (but are not limited to):
Novel internal and/or external pressures which may shape language structure
Interaction among competing internal and/or external pressures on language
Novel empirical generalizations that may be explained by internal and/or external pressures on language
Distinguishing among competing explanations of cross-linguistic similarities and differences
Synthesis of existing work which may shed light on which pressures (don’t) matter for which aspects of language structure
Implication of work on cross-linguistic similarities and differences for the study of human cognition more generally
We invite anonymized submission of abstracts of 2 pages (12 pt font; 1in or 2.5cm margins) — with an extra page for references of figures — on new research on topics related to those listed above by 25 April 2023.
Please submit via EasyChair (to the track 'ESSLLI 2023 Workshop: Internal and external pressures shaping language'): https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=esslli2023