10 Jan
2013
10 Jan
'13
2:45 p.m.
The CEU Department of Cognitive Science cordially invites you to a talk
(as part of its Departmental Colloquium series)
by
Prof. Nicholas Evans,
Department of Linguistics, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian
National University, Canberra. / Institut für Sprachwissenschaft,
Universität Köln
Date: Wednesday, Jan 16, 2013 - 17:00 - 18:30
Location: Department of Cognitive Science, CEU, Frankel Leó út 30-34.,
Room G15
Coordinating Minds: Engagement in grammar
Our ability to interact with others by building a shared and complex
mental world through social cognition is increasingly recognised as a
central driver of human evolution, and as the key capacity underpinning
the evolution of culture, including language. It is social cognition
which enables us to construct functioning societies sharing knowledge,
values and goals, and to undertake collaborative action. It is also
crucial to empathising and communicating with others, to enriching
imprecise signs in context, to maintaining detailed, differentiated
representations of the minds and feelings of those who share our social
universe, to coordinating the exchanges of information that allow us to
keep updating these representations, and to coopting others into
action.
Linguistically, the centrality of social cognition raises several
questions. Can we develop an elaborated architecture of what
speaker/hearers encode in representing social cognition? How far does
this architecture vary across languages, in other words how far have
languages come up with different engineering solutions to the many
difficult demands made on our minds by the complexities of social
cognition? Can we harness the vast variation of the world’s languages to
achieve what Ortega y Gasset called an ‘audacious integration’ of human
possibilities for linguistically-mediated social cognition?
This talk will draw on ongoing research on cross-linguistic differences
in one crucial area of social cognition: the problem of monitoring how
far mind-states of attention, knowledge or expectation – either of
speaker and hearer, or successive mind-states of the speaker – are ‘on
the same page’. While this includes some familiar phenomena, such as the
use of articles or indefinite pronouns to track presumed identifiability
by the hearer, or of discourse particles like German doch or Italian
mica to monitor differences between expectation and actuality, more
extensive typological research finds that these are only a small part
of the full possibility space. Less familiar phenomena to be covered in
this talk include demonstrative systems where speaker or hearer
attention or knowledge plays a crucial role beyond spatial
considerations, systems of verbal inflection which indicate the extent
to which the phenomenon is deemed already known to the address, and a
family of categories leading out from the ‘mirative’ (evaluating states
of affairs as new to the speaker, at the moment of speech) to
evaluations of cognitive newness at earlier points in time.
There have been recent calls for a ‘second person neuroscience’ in
studies of social cognition – for an approach that places dialogue at
the centre of social interaction. If language differences are capable of
significantly reshaping cognition, as seems increasingly clear, it is
likely that they will target social cognition as well. By laying out how
differently grammars can configure the task of mental and attentional
coordination, we gain an initial map of where psycholinguistic studies
can go on to look for likely cognitive effects.
We're looking forward to see you there (Frankel Leo u. 30-34) !
Cognitive Science Events at CEU: http://cognitivescience.ceu.hu/events
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