Empirical Linguistics

Code
570521
Credits
5cr

Description

It needs no reminder that there’s more than one language spoken in the world today: in fact, depending on how one counts, there’s a few thousands of them, all wonderfully complex and exquisitely capable of making us, humans, develop cultures, societies and technologies beyond anything seen in the rest of the biological world. But why aren’t there not only two or three big languages, or, at the other extreme, millions of them? How is this diversity patterned? Are languages randomly spread across the world or are there hot spots of linguistic diversity? Are all languages related to each other? How about borrowing words, sounds and structures between languages? In this short course we survey the shape of these patterns, the mechanisms that explain them, as well as the methods and data sources we can use, as scientists, to answer such questions. The course is designed to be accessible to students with a wide range of backgrounds and interests, but we also explore some topics in relative detail, especially those of current relevance, leading to hot papers in journals such as Science and Nature, and igniting the public imagination.

 

Course plan

Part I: current and recent linguistic diversity

  • What is a language? Hockett’s design features in the twenty-first century. Spoken, signed, written, whistled, and drummed languages.
  • How many languages? Language – dialect – sociolect – register – idiolect – doculect. Number of speakers. Multilingualism, code-switching. Sign languages. The evolution of writing systems.
  • Languages change! Language families, historical linguistics, phylogenetic methods.
  • Language and environment. Language, family and structural diversities. Statistical analysis of structural diversity. Language spread and relations to demographic spreads. Non-linguistic factors affecting linguistic diversity (climate, ecology, anatomy, genetics and cognition). Cultural evolution.

Part II: genetics, evolution, and language

  • The genetic bases of language. Nature versus nurture. Heritability. Overview of genetics. Using the genetics of height as a guide.
  • Modern evolutionary theory. Evolution, population genetics, gene-culture co-evolution and niche construction relevant for language diversity and evolution. The transition to agriculture, lactose tolerance, disease and the immune system. Evo-devo, niche construction, phenotypic plasticity.
  • Language origins and evolution. Brief overview of main theories and data, in the context of human evolution.

 

Asessment

The assessment is based on participation in class (20%), a written essay (50%) on a theme related to that covered in the course (to be discussed individually) either individually or in pairs (in which case the individual contributions should be clearly stated), and a live presentation to the class, planned during the last session of the course (30%).

 

Repeat assessment

Students who obtain a final grade between 3 and 4.9 can reassess their written assignments. The maximum final grade can only be 5.

 

Examination-based assessment

Under exceptional and justified circumstances a single examination (100% of the grade) can be scheduled. Requirement: A ten-page essay on a topic to be agreed with the relevant instructor.

Repeat assessment of single assessment can only be considered for students who fail with grades ranging from 3 to 4.9. The maximum final grade is 5.

 

Bibliography

Book

Richerson, P. J., & Christiansen, M. H. (Eds.). (2013). Cultural evolution: Society, technology, language, and religion (Vol. 12). MIT Press.

Diamond, J. M. (1997). Guns, germs, and steel. W. W. Norton.

Ostler, N. (2005). Empires of the word: A language history of the world. New York: HarperCollins.

Jobling, M. A., Hurles, M., & Tyler-Smith, C. (2019). Human evolutionary genetics: origins, peoples and disease. Garland Science.

Sean B. Carroll (2005) Endless forms most beautiful. W. W. Norton

Diamond, J. (2020). Armas, gérmenes y acero: breve historia de la humanidad en los últimos trece mil años. Debate.

West-Eberhard, M. J. (2003). Developmental plasticity and evolution. Oxford University Press.

Pääbo, S. (2014). Neanderthal man: In search of lost genomes. Hachette UK.

Sykes, R. W. (2020). Kindred: Neanderthal life, love, death and art. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Article

Fisher, S. and S. Vernes. 2015. Genetics and Language sciences. Annual Review of Linguistics 1: 289-310.

Resources

Arrival (2016 movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrival_(film))

Babel no more (http://www.babelnomore.com/)

Language identification games: https://lingyourlanguage.com/ or https://www.languagesquad.com/

Databases: Glottolog (https://glottolog.org/), WALS (https://wals.info/), PHOIBLE (https://phoible.org/)

Simon Fisher talking about the genetics of language (2017; https://youtu.be/ECjpR6ko-ao)

Simon Kirby about iterated learning (2015; https://youtu.be/geetqwCcgl4)