Description

Understanding word order constraints is crucial to define the complexity of human languages (Joshi 1985, Hurford 2011). For decades, word order phenomena have been at the center of fundamental debates in language evolution, including but not limited to debates about the role of domain-specific (Chomsky, 2002) vs. domain general constraints on language structure (e.g., Christiansen & Chater 2016, Liu et al 2017, Culbertson et al 2011; Gomez-Rodriguez 2017, Fedzechkina et al., in press); debates about general constraints (Dryer, 1992) vs. lineage-specific traits in language evolution (e.g., Dunn et al 2011, Blasi et al 2017); debates about orders for initial or early stages of language evolution and the paths of word order transitions (e.g., Meadow et al 2008, Schouwstra & de Swart, 2014; Gell-Mann & Ruhlen 2011, Ferrer-i-Cancho 2017). To this day, word order phenomena continue to be cardinal to many intriguing research questions in a variety of areas touching upon language evolution.

In the past, the Evolang conferences have been the arena for discussions of research on word order but never (as far as we can remember) in the form of a specific workshop. We would like to join forces in the Evolang community and open Evolang to researchers who are not regularly or strongly involved in our community (see the 2^nd and 3^rd invited speakers) to bring together different points of view and methodologies and generate a lively discussion of this central topic in language evolution.

This multidisciplinary workshop welcomes contributions that improve our understanding of the origins and evolution of word order with no prior bound on background or approach. Relevant perspectives include (non-exclusively): historical linguistics, linguistic typology, phylogenetic analyses, computer simulation, experimental approaches to language evolution, psycholinguistics, mathematical modelling, pidgins and creoles, sign language, language acquisition, comparative biology, and socio-economics.

REFERENCES

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