PhD thesis defense of Alexey KOSHEVOY (DePhy Team) will take place on Thursday, 25 September at 14:30 in Espace Pouillon (bâtiment 6, campus Saint-Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo). 

Before the defense, there will be a workshop from 10:00 to 12:35 at the same location, with presentations by Paula Rubio-Fernández (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics), Gemma Boleda (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), and Benjamin Spector (Institut Jean Nicod, ENS-PSL). You will find the detailed program attached to this e-mail. 

Title: “A cultural evolutionary account of the emergence of linguistic laws.”

Abstract: 

Linguistic laws such as Zipf's law of abbreviation (more frequent words are shorter) and Zipf's law of meaning (more frequent words are more ambiguous) have traditionally been interpreted as evidence of communicative efficiency. On this view, languages evolve under the competing demands of speakers and listeners, resulting in systems optimized for communication. This thesis challenges that interpretation, arguing that such pressures are not necessary to account for these laws. Instead, I propose that these patterns emerge from the cultural transmission of language, shaped by domain-general mechanisms. I test these hypotheses using cross-linguistic data, computational and generative inferencemethods, and targeted case studies of cultural dynamics in language and related domains, from writing systems to online lexical innovations.

Thesis supervisors: 

Mme Isabelle DAUTRICHE - Directrice de thèse

M. Olivier MORIN – Directeur de these

Jury members:

M. Benjamin SPECTOR - Président

M. Simon KIRBY - Rapporteur 

Mme Paula RUBIO-FERNANDEZ - Rapporteure

Mme Gemma BOLEDA - Examinatrice