Keynote 1: Communicative efficiency in human languages and beyond
Natalia Levshina (Radboud University Nijmegen)
Date & room TBA
Although never completely absent from functional approaches to language, communicative efficiency has only gained significant attention in linguistics and cognitive science in recent decades. Extensive evidence shows that language users try to communicate efficiently, saving time and effort while making sure that they transfer the intended message successfully. Examples of efficient linguistic behaviour include the negative correlation between the length of referential expressions and accessibility of their referents, omission of unimportant or predictable arguments, phonological reduction of predictable units and Zipf’s law of abbreviation. Other examples include grammatical marking asymmetries, including differential marking, and minimization of domains and syntactic dependencies. In my talk I will demonstrate that all these examples boil down to three fundamental principles of efficient communication. Furthermore, I will explore how those principles manifest themselves in communicative behaviour beyond natural spoken languages, namely, in natural sign languages, animal communication, constructed languages, non-linguistic symbols and artistic forms. I will argue that, despite huge differences, the principle of efficiency fundamentally shapes the communicative practices and semiotic systems of living beings; moreover, it is even observed in the speech of imaginary ones. Additionally, I will address the most pressing challenges facing the current theory of communicative efficiency and discuss several unresolved questions.
Natalia Levshina is an assistant professor of communication and computational methods at Radboud University. Her main research interests are linguistic typology, corpora, cognitive and functional linguistics. After obtaining her PhD at the University of Leuven in 2011, she has worked in Jena, Marburg, Louvain-la-Neuve, Leipzig, where she got her habilitation qualification in 2019, and at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. She has published a book “Communicative Efficiency: Language structure and use” (Cambridge University Press, 2022), in which she formulates the main principles of communicatively efficient linguistic behaviour and shows how these principles can explain why human languages are the way they are. Natalia is also the author of a best-selling statistical manual “How to Do Linguistics with R” (Benjamins, 2015).
Bluesky account: @natalialevshina.bsky.social
Keynote 2: Being “Belgian” in Wisconsin: The evolving intersection of memory, language and heritage
Colleen Cotter (Queen Mary University of London)
Date & room TBA
In this talk, I discuss the intersection of memory, language, and the means by which a small, rural community in northeastern Wisconsin in the Upper Midwest of the USA works to retain its longstanding heritage identity in a complex and changing socio-cultural context, an identity developed since 1853 when the first families from Belgium (Aux Premieres Belges) arrived, attracted by affordable land. They were followed by several thousand Belgian immigrants, mostly from the French/Walloon-speaking areas, settling a stretch of then-forested land in the peninsula adjacent Green Bay.
The region that their 21st-century Belgian-American descendants occupy is now known as an “ethnic island”. The relative isolation of the region initially helped to maintain its ethnic identity as well as the Walloon language (known locally as “Belgian” and now in decline), although this identity has evolved as the world has changed, the dynamics of which is my focus. It is in this context that I show present-day examples of what it means to be “Belgian” in Wisconsin. Through interviews, fieldnotes, and recordings of conversation, I discuss the semiotic importance of specific foods, the historical past and how it is presented, and other indices of identity.
This study argues for expanding Woolard’s (2016) insight about the “logic of authenticity,” highlighting this speech community’s metapragmatic awareness of the features that secure what is “Belgian” for them. The case provides a rich range of facets that are interlinked, allowing insight into “groupness” (Hodges 2018) and affinity and belonging through time and context.
Colleen Cotter is a Professor of Media Linguistics in the Linguistics Department at Queen Mary University of London. Her research encompasses ethnographic and collaborative field-based approaches to news media language, endangered languages, identity and society, discourse and technology, arts and heritage, and the representation of social attitudes in popular culture and story. She is the author of News Talk: Investigating the Language of Journalism (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and co-editor of two books: COVID Semiotics: Magical Thinking and the Management of Meaning (Routledge, 2015; with Mark Allen Peterson) and The Routledge Handbook of Language and Media (Routledge, 2018; with Daniel Perrin).