讲座题目：How strict science methods help answer questions about language
主讲人：Micha? B. Paradowski（华沙大学语言文字应用研究所）
时 间：9月6日（周二）15:00-16:30
地 点：上外虹口校区图书馆6楼报告厅
主 办：上外语言研究院
主讲人简介：
Micha? B. Paradowski is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Applied Linguistics, University of Warsaw. He has authored several journal articles and book chapters, delivered presentations at numerous applied linguistics conferences and been an invited speaker at scientific events in Europe, America and Asia. His interests include issues relating to SLA research, the availability of UG, the effects of formal instruction, and language-teaching pedagogy in general; his second concentration is complexity science and its perspective on language evolution, development, competition and spread.
讲座摘要：
Language is a system of symbols registering categorisation of the world and human creation, but also a device used to alter reality. Words—created, used, supplanted with new ones—lie at the foundations of ideologies, religions, legal systems and cultural markets. At the same time language, its internal behaviour, as well as interactions with other patois exhibit properties of continually emergent complex adaptive systems, well known in physical, natural and social sciences. We shall present the distinctive features of a complex system, and demonstrate how language evolution and spread can be analysed computationally.
The uptake of novel linguistic creations shares common features of general emergent phenomena: simple local interactions leading to the occurrence of a macroscopic pattern, typically without prior design or orchestrator, and difficult to predict analytically owing to nonlinear global dynamics and high entropy. Results will be presented of an empirical study analysing the character and speed of social diffusion of novel linguistic formations in a microblogging site, devised with the aim of describing the processes of the emergence of systemic order from low-level interactions between agents inventing and imitating discrete lexemes. A complex systems perspective, of late transforming many branches of science, can lead to a deeper understanding of how mutual relations and communication between interactants impact the evolution of language in time and space, and the shape and dynamics of the interactions themselves, delivering quantitative estimates on the expansion of linguistic expressions and the process of disambiguating their meaning, additionally allowing the prediction of future trends and their scale. Other areas of language amenable to strict science investigations will also be highlighted.
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