Speaker: Jack Wilson, University of Salford
Wed 26th February 12:00 – 13:00 UK time. This seminar will be held in person in Gilbert 1 and you can join us online via Microsoft Teams.
Abstract
Demonstratives are words like ‘this’ and ‘that’ in English. In the world’s languages, demonstratives tend to come in (at least) pairs, where one (e.g. ‘this’) is proximal and the other (e.g. ‘that’) is distal. A peculiar and underexplored feature of the world’s demonstratives is that the proximal term is significantly more likely to be produced with a higher-frequency vowel.
In this talk, I will argue that the distribution of vowels in demonstratives is based on spatial auditory processing. Furthermore, I will argue that the mechanisms of sound localisation play a fundamental role in the development of acoustic communication systems and in the development of theory of mind.
Biography
Jack Wilson is a Lecturer in English language at the University of Salford. His research explores how meaning-making transcends the boundaries of conventional linguistic systems. His recent publications include Pragmatics, Utterance Meaning, and Representation Gesture (2024), which applies the principles of predictive processing to multimodal communication.