Full Title: The Evolution of Language
Short Title: Evolang8

Date: 14-Apr-2010 - 17-Apr-2010
Location: Utrecht, Netherlands
Contact Person: Willem Zuidema
Meeting Email: zuidema@uva.nl
Web Site: http://evolang2010.nl

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics

Call Deadline: 02-Oct-2009

Meeting Description:

Evolang8

The 8th International conference on the Evolution of Language (Evolang8),
will
be held 14-17 April, 2010 in the historic city of Utrecht, in the
Netherlands.
The conference again promises to be an exciting event.

The following speakers have accepted an invitation for a plenary
presentation:
-Stephen Anderson (Yale)
- Morten Cristiansen (Cornell)
- Terrence Deacon (Berkeley)
- Peter Gardenfors (Lund)
- MarcHauser (Harvard)
- Wil Roebroeks (Leiden)
- Eors Szathmary (Budapest)
- Maggie Tallerman (Newcastle)

In addition, 12 experts in various contributing fields have been invited to
present papers in an attempt to involve in the conference a larger number of
pertinent areas and prominent participants. The full list of invited
speakers,
and lots of other information, is at our website: http://evolang2010.nl

Call for Papers

The conference welcomes substantive contributions relating to the evolution
of
human language from any relevant discipline, including Anthropology,
Genetics,
Population Biology, Linguistics, Psychology, Primatology, Ethology,
Paleontology, Archeology, Artificial Life and Mathematical Modelling. Normal
standards of academic quality apply. Thus, submitted papers should aim to
make
clear their own substantive claim, relating this to relevant scientific
literature, and briefly setting out the method by which the claim is
substantiated, the nature of the relevant data, and/or the core of the
theoretical argument concerned.

Types of Submission:

There are two possible types of submission:
- Full Papers, which can have a length of between 6 and 8 pages.
- Abstracts, which can be at most 2 pages long.

All accepted submissions will be published in the proceedings of the
conference.
All papers or abstracts accepted will be allotted the same presentation
length
(probably 25 minutes plus 10 minutes discussion). Proceedings will be
published
by World Scientific. Formatting instructions (MS Word, Latex) are available
through the website: http://evolang2010.nl

Important Dates:

- Submissions due: 2 October 2009
- Acceptance Notifications: 13 November 2009
- Final versions due (provisional): 11 December 2009.

All submissions are handled by our electronic submission system accessible
through http://evolang2010.nl

Workshops:

Prior to the main conference, three full-day workshops are planned on
Wednesday
April 14th. Separate calls for papers for these workshops will be sent out
in
due time on the evolang mailing list -- sign up for the mailing list on our
website. The themes for these workshops are:
- Human language & bird song
- The evolution of semantics
- Computational modelling of language evolution

Local Organizers

The conference is hosted by the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS (UiL
OTS)
of Utrecht University, the Netherlands. The Local Organizing Committee are
taking various steps to ensure that Evolang 2010 will be a significant event
from a scientific perspective. These include inviting, in addition to
plenary
speakers, a number of other leading scientists to present papers at the
conference, extending the range of pertinent perspectives on language
evolution
to be included in the programme, revising the review procedure for submitted
papers, and exploring the
possibility of publishing, in addition to the proceedings, a selection of
reworked/expanded papers with an publisher of high repute. All details are
at
http://evolang2010.nl.