Update 10.03.2020: Since Evolang 2020 is now cancelled due to Coronavirus fears, so is our workshop. If the conference would be resurrected in a year’s time, as hinted as a possibility by the organizers, we would try to reconvene the workshop as well.
Andres Karjus (University of Edinburgh)
Jack Grieve (University of Birmingham)
Anne Kandler (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology)
Language change, like other evolutionary processes, involves both directed selection as well as stochastic drift (Sapir 1921; Jespersen 1922; Andersen 1987; McMahon 1994; Croft 2000; Baxter et al. 2006; Van de Velde 2014; Steels & Szathmáry 2018).
Selective advantage of a variant may rise from various sources, such as sociolinguistic prestige of competing variants (Labov 2011; Hernández-Campoy & Conde-Silvestre 2012), culture-specific communicative need (Regier et al. 2016, Gibson et al. 2017, Karjus et al. to appear), dissemination across domains (Altmann et al. 2011; Stewart & Eisenstein 2018), momentum (Stadler et al. 2016), conscious language planning actions (Ghanbarnejad et al. 2014; Daoust 2017), an interplay of exogenous and endogenous factors (Cuskley et al. 2014), cognitive biases (Smith et al. 2013; Winter & Wedel 2016; Culbertson 2017) or simply the form of a variant in terms of length (Zipf 1949; Kanwal et al. 2017) and iconicity (Dingemanse et al. 2015). Additionally, various usage and acquisition properties have been shown to predictors of success (Kershaw et al. 2016; Calude et al. 2017; Grieve 2018; Monaghan & Roberts 2019; Turney et al. 2019).
Competition may be viewed as operating within but also between languages, the former leading to the replacement of communicative variants, the latter to the extinction of entire languages. Signatures of innovation, selection and competition should be inferable from the usage statistics alone, given adequately large and representative diachronic data. This is an idea that has been explored in the domain of language change (Reali & Griffiths 2010; Blythe 2012; Sindi & Dale 2016; Newberry et al. 2017; Amato et al. 2018; Grieve et al. 2018), cultural evolution (Hahn & Bentley 2003; Kandler & Crema 2019) as well as inter-language competition (Abrams & Strogatz 2003; Zhang & Gong 2013; Kandler & Steele 2017). Selection for communicative variants and languages to use takes place on the level of the individual, but historical data often consists of only imperfect aggregate samples from the population, presenting problems for inference (Pechenick et al. 2015; de Smet 2016; Fonteyn 2017; Petré & Van de Velde 2018; Kandler et al. 2017).
These topics are highly interrelated, but the research is spread across multiple disciplines including linguistics, biology, physics, mathematics and computer science. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers working on various aspects of these issues, including the interplay of drift and selection in language change, success of innovations and borrowings, and competition dynamics both within and between languages.
We welcome contributions dealing with (but not limited to) methods of identifying these processes, issues regarding data (corpora, censuses, surveys, assemblages, etc.), empirical investigations as well as modelling results.
Please send a 1-page abstract to driftselection2020 (@) gmail.com.
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