Anthropology Distinguished Scholar Lecture, Feb. 10

Fundamental differences across the world’s languages can serve as a window into many aspects of human thought. In this talk, Caleb Everett, Ph.D., dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Delaware, will survey a number of results demonstrating how crosslinguistic research can better inform our understanding of four key branches of nonlinguistic cognition: spatial, temporal, numerical and sensory. These results have accrued primarily in the last two decades, and even in the last few years, underscoring the extent to which languages and cognition can vary across the world’s cultures. Everett will focus on a series of results discussed in his last two books. The results are the product of the work of dozens of researchers across a variety of disciplines working on many languages in diverse locales. Those results suggest that, far from simply categorizing ideas, objects and relationships in broadly similar ways, languages encode many concepts in non-universal and often esoteric ways. The results suggest as well that linguistic differences both reflect and affect key concepts associated with the four cognitive domains focused on here.

Everett is a professor of anthropology, linguistics and cognitive science. His research explores linguistic, cognitive and cultural diversity. It relies on varied methods, from field work in Amazonia, to computational analyses of data from many distinct populations, to experimental tests of the aerosol particles people produce while speaking. This work, much of it involving collaborations with other scholars and students, has appeared in three books and varied journals.