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The big, bright future of linguistics

Lecture by Russell Gray, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History

Info about event

Time

Wednesday 21 September 2016,  at 13:00 - 15:00

Location

Nobel Auditorium, 1482-105, Jens Chr. Skous Vej 4

Organizer

Peter Bakker
© Anna Schroll

Russell Gray’s research spans the areas of cultural evolution, linguistics, animal cognition, and the philosophy of biology. He helped pioneer the application of computational evolutionary methods to questions about linguistic prehistory and cultural evolution. His work has shed new insights on the 200 year-old debate on the origin of Indo-European languages, dubbed by Diamond and Bellwood as “the most intensively studied, yet still most recalcitrant problem in historical linguistics”. In collaboration with colleagues in Europe he extended this evolutionary approach to test hypotheses about the roles of culture and cognition in constraining linguistic variation. In contrast to the claims of some generative linguists, the analyses revealed striking language family specific dependencies. His core research focuses on questions about the history of languages, cultures and people in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.   

Contact: Russell Gray, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History