Abstract:
Abstract: I conclude this lecture series by presenting ongoing research at the linguistics-primatology interface. We explore ways in which the gestures of our closest non-human relatives in the great ape family may overlap in their form and meaning with the gestures of humans, and argue for the existence of universal building blocks of body-based meaning encoding, some of which may have been present in our last common ancestor with chimpanzees, over 6 million years ago. While primatology has unearthed a rich body of data on ape gestures, linguistics provides the tools to determine the abstract meanings that underlie the observed functions of a given gesture.
(ATTENTION: CANCELLED!)
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.