Syntax: Neurobiological Considerations, Dr. Cedric Boeckx

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Please note: This talk is free for UBC Language Sciences members to attend. Please register via the conference’s platform (EasyChair) but do not pay the registration fee unless you wish to attend the entire forum. Instead, email co-organizer Dr. Hermann Keupdjio at hermann.keupdjio@mail.mcgill.ca to indicate you are a UBC Language Sciences member and wish to attend the talk. You will then be given access to the platform. To access the talk: click ‘VCS’ in the top left hand corner, and then ‘Information’. At 8.45am PDT on May 31st, you will be able to click the access link to Move&Agree2021 virtual sessions, and select Dr. Boeckx’s session.

Join Language Sciences, UBC Linguistics, and McGill Linguistics for 'Syntax: Neurobiological Considerations' , a talk by Dr. Cedric Boeckx on Monday 31st May at 9am PDT as part of the Move & Agree forum

Abstract: This tutorial addresses the biological and neurological foundations of human language. The discussion will be centered around the following four interconnected questions:

(i) From an inter-species and cross-species perspective, what is the possible (dis)connect between audible vocal production, visual sign production, and multi-modal perception and production.
(ii) In an era of “big data”, “big theory” is becoming increasingly important, raising the question of how linguistic data and research can inform “big theorizing”.
(ii) In a biolinguistics perspective, what is the relevance of linguistic diversity?
(iv) In a theory of human language embedded in a bio-linguistics approach, what is the possible (ir)relevance of the following linguistic tropes: “conceptual necessity”, “Merge”, “Move”, “recursion”, “categorization".

Speaker bio: Dr. Cedric Boeckx is a Research Professor at the Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies (ICREA), a member of the Universitat de Barcelona Institute of Complex Systems (UBICS), and a member of the section of General Linguistics at the Universitat de Barcelona. Dr. Boeckx's research focuses on developing new ways of advancing what is sometimes called the biolinguistic program or cognitive biology, a growing interdisciplinary enterprise seeking to uncover the biological foundations of the human language faculty and cognition.

This event is co-hosted with the UBC and McGill University Departments of Linguistics, as part of the Move & Agree forum. The ‘Move and Agree Forum 2021′ is co-hosted by the University of British Columbia and McGill University. This forum explores the connection between A′-movement and A′-agreement with two goals in mind: to gain a broader and deeper empirical coverage of A′-agreement via case studies of typologically distinct languages from a variety of language families; to move forward the theory of A′-agreement defined as a non-local morphosyntactic feature-sharing mechanism that correlates with A′-movement (Baier 2018).