Islands of Cognition

Activity: Participating in or organising an event › Organising a conference, workshop, ...

Description

In April 2018, Peter Bakker and Joshua Nash invited 12 speakers to participate in a workshop entitled Exploring Island Languages at Aarhus University. Each speaker shared knowledge of a specific language spoken by a speech community living on a particular island or archipeligo. While the notion of ‘islandness’ was the common denominator, some of the languages discussed were typologically very different from the others. The decision to include a variety of languages facilitated the objective: to answer the question “Is there anything unique about island languages?” Our discussions and conclusions are presented in the article ‘On languages on islands’, to be published in the journal Acta Linguistica Hafniensia later this year.

The conference Islands of Cognition seeks to elaborate on the theme of island languages. In this conference, the focus is directed at specific attributes of each language or language type to be discussed. Simultaneously, our objective is to provide students and teachers of Icelandic, General Linguistics and other Humanities subjects at the University of Iceland with an insight into the constraints imposed by domain-general cognitive function on the structural diversity characteristic of communicative systems known collectively as human language. Additionally, it is hoped that our guests from Denmark and Greenland learn about research performed from the perspectives of first and second language acquisition, cognitive and usage-based grammar and by scholars at the University of Iceland.

The conference will showcase original research conducted from the cognitive perspective with the ultimate aim of demonstrating how domain-general cognitive processes such as comparison, analogy, categorisation, schematisation and entrenchment facilitate language acquisition, language usage and language change.

Our nine speakers come from six countries and work at one of three institutions of higher education: Aarhus University, the University of Greenland and the University of Iceland. Each of the nine papers will focus on a particular island language or type of island language: Crucian (St. Croix, in the Carribean), Faroese, Greenlandic, Icelandic, Pitcairn (South Pacific) and Reta (Indonesia). All papers will be presented in English.
Period26 Apr 2019
Event typeConference
LocationReykjavík, IcelandShow on map
Degree of RecognitionInternational

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