Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw; Society for Interdisciplinary Studies on Language and the Distributed Language Group have a pleasure to invite you to: LANGUAGE AS SOCIAL COORDINATION: AN EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE Warsaw, 16-18 September 2010 The conference emphasizes the biological nature of language, underscoring its coordinative function. The aim of the conference is to 1) show continuity of natural language with other informational systems in biology; 2) show that language arises from and is crucial for human co-action. Taking an evolutionary and comparative perspective, will draw attention to the kinds of social coordination that arise without (human-like) language, and that contribute to the background used by (and present in) linguistic communication. By so doing, it will be easier to appreciate the qualitatively different types of co-ordination that are specific to humans and language-dependent. INVITED SPEAKERS: * John Collier, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban * Terrence Deacon, University of California at Berkeley * Merlin Donald, Queen's University, Kingston * Don Favareau, National University of Singapore * Bruno Galantucci, Yeshiva University, New York * Don Ross, University of Alabama at Birmingham and University of Cape Town * John Schumann, University of California, Los Angeles * Colwyn Trevarthen, University of Edinburgh CALL FOR PAPERS We welcome papers from biology, linguistics, psychology, communication science, philosophy, anthropology and artificial intelligence in a joint effort to provide a theoretical ground for such a view of language, and - even more importantly - to provide empirical data clarifying the mechanisms of language functioning and emergence. For more information please visit our webpage: www.psych.uw.edu.pl/lasc Abstracts of 250-500 words length should be sent to LaSC_Warsaw2010(a)psych.uw.edu.pl or raczasze(a)psych.uw.edu.pl Deadline for abstracts: May 15th, 2010 Abstract notification: May 28th, 2010 Early Registration: May 28th - August 15th, 2010 Late Registration: After August 15th, 2010