STONY BROOK, N.Y., October 4, 2005—The first Alice V. and David H. Morris International Symposium on Language and Communication will bring eminent scholars from around the globe to Stony Brook University on October 14-16. The event, to be held at the Charles B. Wang Center, will cover a broad range of issues as world-famous specialists in linguistics, in non-human animal communication, in theories of language origin and in theories of the evolution of human social behavior will participate.
The public talks and debates at the symposium will continue the ongoing revolution in our understanding of human language evolution.
“This symposium brings together an unprecedented diversity of views and insights into the language evolution problem,” said Paul Bingham, Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Stony Brook and one of the presenters. “Moreover, the format of the meeting encourages participants to stimulate and challenge one another. This conference is likely to be one of the key events in the ongoing emergence of an entirely new level of understanding of why we are the only animal to speak. This new understanding, in turn, will also have diverse ramifications beyond linguistics and throughout the cognitive and social sciences.”
In addition to Bingham, among the distinguished researchers who will make presentations are Derek Bickerton from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Ray S. Jackendoff of Brandeis, Noam Chomsky of MIT, Michael Corballis of the University of Auckland, Mark Hauser of Harvard, and Peter Gärdenfors of Lund University in Sweden.
The symposium is presented by the Alice V. and David H. Morris Memorial Fund, which is managed by the New York Community Trust. David Hennen Morris and Alice Vanderbilt Morris had a sustained intellectual and practical interest in human language and communication. Both individuals were members of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). Alice Morris was in fact one of the 31 women Foundation Members at the LSA's creation in 1925, and remained active in the LSA for decades.
Mrs. Morris showed a particular interest in linguistic research that addressed underlying grammatical and conceptual uniformities between languages. She financially supported Edward Sapir's cross-linguistic semantic studies of totality (1930) and grading phenomena (1944); she also personally edited Sapir and Morris Swadesh's 1932 cross-linguistic study of ending-point phenomena, and William Edward Collinson's 1937 study of indication.
For a schedule of the program and a complete list of the speakers, please visit http://www.linguistics.stonybrook.edu/events/nyct05/index.htm.
