Language Change as Competition
Ann Taylor

• Wednesday 6 June 2018, 7.30PM to 8.30pm
• Free admission
  Booking required
  Book tickets
• The Basement, City Screen Picturehouse, Coney Street (map)
• Wheelchair accessible

Event details

Languages change constantly, to the extent that over long periods of time, the earlier stages of a language can become incomprehensible to later generations. For us today, reading Chaucer is quite difficult and Beowulf, impossible.

Join us at York Café Scientifique as Ann Taylor of the University of York explores how language change works. She’ll explain how language change can be modelled as competition between linguistic forms, in a way similar to the competition between species.

This event is part of the York Café Scientifique series organised by the Yorkshire Philosophical Society.

About the speaker

Dr Ann Taylor is a Senior Lecturer with the University of York’s Department of Language and Linguistic Science. Her research focuses on syntactic variation and change in the early stages of English.

York Café Scientifique

York Café Scientifique is organised by the Yorkshire Philosophical Society (YPS) and is held on the first Wednesday of each month, from September to July (not in August and January), in City Screen Basement, Coney Street, York.  The event is free and includes a presentation about a key area of scientific or technological research followed by a Q & A.

York Café Scientifique provides an opportunity, over a coffee, a glass of wine or a beer, to enjoy a dialogue with cutting-edge researchers about their work and its implications for all of us. For further information please visit ypsyork.org/cafe-scientifique/