On Tues March 5, 6:30pm London time, Cedric Boeckx will be speaking LIVE @UCLAnthropology in the Daryll forde Room, 2nd Floor, Dept of Anthropology, UCL, 14 Taviton St London WC1H 0BW (currently please use the Archaeology Institute entrance). You can join us on ZOOM (ID 384 186 2174 passcode Wawilak). Cedric Boeckx is Research Professor at the Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies (ICREA), a member of the Universitat de Barcelona Institute of Neuroscience and Institute of Complex Systems (UBICS), as well as a member of the section of General Linguistics at the Universitat de Barcelona. His current research focuses on developing new ways to shed light on the neurobiological foundations of the human language faculty.
CEdric writes: “A lot of attention has been paid to the combinatorial aspects of human language and how they may have evolved. Comparatively less attention has been devoted to the units of combination, the “words”. I’ll argue that asking evolutionary questions about “words” enables us to touch on broader questions about our cognitive make-up and, crucially, the communities in which language acquisition/use takes place. Examining the prerequisites that a rich symbolic culture imposes helps us probe further the nature of prosociality (and its limits) in our species.”