Abstract:
Abstract: As a postdoctoral researcher, I began to expand the study of structure and meaning to the natural world. In this lecture I focus on a case study from Bharatanatyam dance. With a larger goal of determining how structure and meaning are construed in a range of communicative systems, I argue that a semantic approach to dance can be modeled closely after the formal semantics of visual narrative, such as comics or silent movies. A core finding of this research is that dance not only shares properties of other fundamentally human means of expression, such as visual narrative, but that it also exhibits similarities to sign languages and the gestures of non-signers. From the perspective of general human cognition, these conclusions support the idea that linguistic investigations beyond language yield insights into the very nature of the human mind and of the communicative devices that it provides.
Attend the lecture: 08/11/2024, 7:30pm
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https://uio.zoom.us/j/66335850819?pwd=bNMzYASyY0r51yHk0yqduMJRBsFgoJ.1
Meeting ID: 663 3585 0819
Passcode: 061175
Mini bio:
Pritty Patel-Grosz is Professor of Linguistics and director of the Super Linguistics Research Group at the University of Oslo. She was educated at University College London, and obtained a PhD in Linguistics from MIT. Her early interests include the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interface and psycholinguistics. She has conducted research on individual variables, agreement and anaphoric presuppositions. In recent work, P. Patel-Grosz advocates for the emerging field of Super Linguistics, whose goal is to expand the traditional boundaries of language and linguistics, by applying formal linguistic methodology to non-standard objects beyond language. P. Patel-Grosz’s current research proposes a unified semantic theory of body movement. In collaboration with musicologists and primatologists, she has explored the semantics of narrative dance, and illustrated its similarities to linguistic semantics; this research is now being extended to non-human primates.