CCT Director to present at AAAS annual meeting next week in Boston

CCT Director Dr. David Lightfoot will be presenting his paper, entitled Phase Transitions in Language History, next week (Feb. 14-18) at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Boston.

Dr. Lightfoot’s paper discusses big structural changes within the biology and evolution of human language as part of the Historical Syntax symposium.

Here is an abstract of his paper:

Languages undergo phase transitions when several surface phenomena change simultaneously. Sometimes linguists can explain why the particular phenomena cluster together and why/how the phase transition took place when it did. The timing of the shift results from prior changes that reshaped what children heard and, therefore, in a kind of domino effect, triggered a different structure in the systems that children developed. That is, we explain the phase transition through the way in which children acquire their linguistic systems.