Report of the 7th International Conference in Evolutionary Linguistics

The 7^th International Conference in Evolutionary Linguistics (CIEL-7)* took place in Nankai University (NKU), June 12-14, 2015. Before the main conference, there were a series of lectures and tutorials on June 10-11 around the foundational issues of evolutionary linguistics and its related fields, such as brain imaging studies, human genetic research, complex system research, experimental linguistics and computational modeling. The main conference was jointly organized by Institute of Linguistics and School of Literature of Nankai University. Over 96 registrants, from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, France, Austria, Estonia, Czech Republic, Singapore, and U.S.A. attended and participated in the three day conference. There were seven keynote speeches, 50 oral presentations and 20 poster presentations featuring six major themes: language evolution at the macro-, meso- and microscopic scales, genetic and archaeological evidence for language evolution, language and the brain, diachronic and synchronic study of language, the origins of Chinese, and other language evolution related research (such as child language acquisition and pathological linguistics). Both English and Chinese were working languages of the conference.

1. LANGUAGE EVOLUTION AT THE MACRO-, MESO- AND MICROSCOPIC SCALES

As the first keynote speaker and honorary chairman of the conference, William S.-Y. Wang () of The Chinese University of Hong Kong talked about “Language Across Our Life-span”. He began by describing three time scales of the inter-generation study of language, which are defined as micro-history, meso-history, and macro-history respectively, all dealing with diachronic language evolution across time. Moreover, language acquisition in young children and the decline of language at the sunset end of our life-span (i.e., the intra-generation language development and recession across our life-span) are also the vital questions in language change. By showing many empirical examples (e.g., newborns’ cry melody is shaped by their native language; mother’s voice and heartbeat sounds elicit auditory plasticity in the human brain before full gestation), he further suggested that the biological machinery for social learning kicks in even when in the womb, and infants’ perception specializes for their native language as early as 6 months; later on, the sensitive period for phonology winds down around puberty. In stark contrast, previously little is known about the decline of language when people grow old, even though the world’s population is ageing fast. He emphasized that the problems here were both urgent and severe, compounded by many forms of brain diseases that impair language. Unlike the aphasias, these diseases and their linguistic consequences have been recognized only recently. Discovering potential linguistic markers for diagnosing and prognosticating such diseases would be an invaluable contribution both to science and to society. At last, he expressed hopes that such related researches should not be based on the skewed sample of just the Western languages, and we should extend our focus beyond the familiar scene of Western languages in a serious way.

First, in considering language change within the largest time perspective, its macro-history, we need to look into neighboring disciplines that work on related questions, such as anthropology, biology, zoology, and so on. Tecumseh Fitch of The University of Vienna gave a keynote speech on “The Biology and Evolution of Language: An Update and Prospectus”. He began with the introduction of bio-linguistics, representing the building bridges between biology and the cognitive science of language. In comparison to the Chimpanzees, he then demonstrated three novel components of language: signal (complex signals: vocal control & learning), syntax (compositional, hierarchical processing) and semantics (intention to communicate). He further proposed ‘the dendrophilia hypothesis’: humans have a species-typical, but domain general, ability and propensity to infer tree-formed, hierarchical structures from patterns. Finally, he made general conclusions that comparative studies of a wide variety of vertebrates are relevant to construct cognitive phylogenies, and models of proto-language are testable, once made concrete, and can be evaluated using comparative data as well as genetic data.

Second, one of the important aspects in meso-history of language, with changes that occur across centuries or millennia, goes to the horizontal transmission...