Today we announced the results of our short story competition Language Evolves. Over the last year we’ve worked with over 70 sci-fi authors to help them write stories inspired by our research into the evolution of language. The competition was judged by Mary Doria Russell and Gwyneth Lewis, and the winning stories are published today in the New Welsh...

The 7th International Conference “Ways to Protolanguage” (http://www.protolang7.org/) is going to take place at the University of Düsseldorf and online from Sept 6 to Sept 8, 2021. The thematic focus of Protolang is on delineating the socio-cultural, semiotic, symbolic, ecological, genetic, anatomical and neuro-cognitive...

Last week, Bill Thompson, Gary Lupyan and I published a paper using word embeddings to look at semantic similarity between languages (copy of paper here). We showed that some semantic domains are more closely aligned (i.e., are more translatable) than other domains. But what would linguists actually predict? Before the paper was released,...

That’s the title of my latest working paper. You can download it here: https://www.academia.edu/41095277/Divergence_and_Reticulation_in_Cultural_Evolution_Some_draft_text_for_an_article_in_progress. And you can participate in a discussion of it here: https://www.academia.edu/s/9b97738023. Abstract, Contents, and introductory material below. ...

I’m currently working on a long article in which I review two recent critiques of computational criticism (one by Nan Z. Da and the other by Franco Moretti and Oleg Sobchuk). Moretti and Sobchuk introduce cultural evolution into their discussion, but don’t say much about it, and I’m suspect that their audience, and mine, is unfamiliar with current work...

Time to saddle-up and once more ride my current hobby horse, or one of them at least. In this case, the idea that natural language is the simplest aspect of human activity that is fundamentally and irreducibly computational in nature. Let’s back into it. * * * * * Is arithmetic calculation computational in kind? Well...