Please join us for a meeting of the Language Variation & Change workshop, this Friday, October 18 at 3:30pm, in Rosenwald 301. Light refreshments will be served.

Language is complex, not complicated…and what it shares in common with seemingly unrelated phenomena
Michał B. Paradowski, University of Warsaw

A growing body of 21st-century research has sought to integrate methods and techniques from disparate fields of science. Knowledge from different disciplines has been harnessed to address both long-standing and novel questions stemming from more recent topics of study. Inter- and transdisciplinary perspectives have been on the rise, given their potential for mutual inspiration and innovative cross-fertilisation of ideas. The talk will draw on several diverse phenomena from the biological world that can find parallels in language, and thus successfully inspire both entirely novel and extension studies. In the process I will also bring forth the results of our own research projects whose starting point has been a complex systems perspective on language phenomena.