Today Annemarie Verkerk was invited as keynote speaker at the 47th Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (March 4–7 2025) to give a talk on „The evolutionary dynamics of language: universals, rates of change, and explanations„. You can find the abstract below:

In the past decades, a shared quantitative framework for typology and historical linguistics has arisen: linguistic phylogenetics. For historical linguistics, phylogenetics can serve as a means to test hypotheses on family relations in a quantitative manner. In its wake, other quantitative tools have emerged, such as computer-assisted cognate detection (List et al. 2018). This talk is concerned with the use of phylogenetics for typology, which involves modeling how linguistic features change on the branches of a phylogeny (family tree). This allows us to test hypotheses about correlation (Dunn et al. 2011), the speed at which typological features change (rate of change, Greenhill et al. 2010) and inferences on what typological features may have looked like in the past (ancestral state estimation, Phillips & Bowern 2022).

In this talk, I will present three case-studies that speak to these three aspects of the evolutionary dynamics of language: correlations, rates of change, and ancestral states. The first case study is on universals, presenting evidence for a large set of Greenbergian implicational universals using phylogenetic methods. The second case study is on indigenous numeral systems, uncovering whether frequently attested base types are favoured evolutionarily through increased rates of change. The third case study is an assessment of reconstructing word order variation in different branches of Indo-European. Throughout, the topic of explaining feature distributions is central: how can we marry functional explanations, for example those rooted in processing efficiency or economy, with linguistic variation and change?

In our next LangSci talk Haim Dubossarsky, Lecturer in NLP at Queen Mary University of London, will give a talk on „Frontiers and Gaps in Lexical Semantic Change Research„.

The talk will take place as a hybrid event in building A 2.2, room 2.02 and on MS Teams on Tuesday, March 11th, at 3.30pm!

The same week Jet Hoek, Assistant Professor at the Department of Language and Communication at Radboud University Nijmegen, will give a talk on „Not all discourse is created equal: On the effects of discourse structure on coreference„.

The talk will take place as a hybrid event in building A 2.2, room 2.02 and on MS Teams on Friday, March 14th, at 9.15am!

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In our next LangSci talk, Elsi Miia Kaiser, Professor of Linguistics at USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, will give a talk on „The challenges of understanding and being understood: Psycholinguistic explorations of communicative efficiency„.

The hybrid talk will take place in building A 2.2, room 2.02. and on MS Teams February 6th at 16:15!

In our next LangSci talk, Agnieszka Chmiel,  University professor at Faculty of English at Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań, will give a talk on „Lexical processing in simultaneous interpreting – insights from experimental and corpus-based research„.

The hybrid talk will take place only on MS Teams January 30th at 16:15!

In our next LangSci talk, Shiri Lev-Ari,  Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, will give a talk on „Language from a social networks perspective„.

The hybrid talk will take place in building A 2.2, room 2.02. and on MS Teams January 23rd at 16:15!

After the talk we would like to invite you all to celebrate the start of the new year together in building A2.2, room 2.07.1.

In our next LangSci talk, Wing-Yee Chow,  Associate Professor in Experimental Linguistics at University College London (UCL), will give a talk on „Incremental prediction in real-time language comprehension: from meaning to pitch contour„.

The hybrid talk will take place only on MS Teams December 12th at 16:15!

In our next LangSci talk, Alane Suhr, Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley EECS, will give a talk on „The Role of Joint Embodiment in Situated Language-Based Interactions„.

The hybrid talk will take place in building A 2.2, room 2.02. and on MS Teams November 28th at 16:15!

In our next LangSci colloquium, Yang Xu, Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto, will give a talk on „Evolution of the lexicon„.

The hybrid talk will take place in building A 2.2, room 2.02. and on MS Teams November 14th at 16:15!

In our next LangSci talk, Livio Gaeta, Professor for German Language and Linguistics from the University of Turin, will give a talk on „Between Productivity and Creativity: Snowclones we live by„.

The hybrid talk will take place in building A 2.2, room 2.02. and on MS Teams November 7th at 16:15!