Prof. Salikoko S. Mufwene

 

Time: 7:00-9:00pm, May 28, 2010 (Friday)

Venue: Room 116, Wen Nan Building

Tsinghua University

 

 

I use the term language evolution broadly in reference to 1) the phylogenic emergence of language, 2) structural changes that various languages have undergone in human history, and 3) processes of language birth and death in documented human history. The term ecology is being used to subsume factors in human mind, anatomy, and society that bear on language evolution. And exaptation is co-opted to underscore the fact that all these processes are consequences of human adaptive responses to communicative pressures as determined by the human mental and social ecologies and fashioned in some cases by human anatomy. This is an invitation to look at languages as unplanned emergent phenomena or complex adaptive systems whose properties fall in place thanks to little understood dynamics of human social interactions, where the action of language evolution is grounded, involving self-organization.

 

Salikoko S. Mufwene is the Frank J. McLoraine Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics and the College at the University of Chicago, where he also serves as Professor on the Committee on Evolutionary Biology and as an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Comparative Human Development and in the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture. His current research is on language evolution, including the development of creoles, the indigenization of English, the evolution of language, and language birth and death, all approached from the perspectives of population genetics and macroecology. Globalization has also featured prominently in his work on language endangerment. He is the author of The Ecology of Language Evolution (CUP, 2001), Créoles, écologie sociale, évolution linguistique (l’Harmattan, 2005), and Language Evolution: Contact, competition and change (Continuum Press, 2008), editor and co-translator of Robert Chaudenson’s Creolization of language and culture (Routledge 2001), and editor of Africanisms in Afro-American Language Varieties (University of Georgia Press, 1993), lead editor of Topics in African Linguistics (Benjamins, 1993), African-American English (Routledge, 1998), Polymorphous linguistics: Jim McCawley’s legacy (MIT Press, 2005), and co-editor (with Cécile B. Vigouroux) of Globalization and language vitality: Perspectives from Africa (Continuum Press, 2008). Author of about 200 articles, book chapters, review articles, book reviews, and other scholarly essays, he is also the series editor of the Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact.