Language and Cognition Department -

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The Language and Cognition Department investigates the relationship between language and general cognition, making use of the "natural laboratory" of language variation. To this end, it maintains about a dozen field sites around the world, where languages are described often for the first time, the semantic categories examined and field experiments conducted.

Current research has two main strands. The first concerns the use of language in interactive situations and its foundations in cognition — the Interactional Foundations of Language project. The second concerns the nature of semantic categories across languages, explores their diversity, and investigates the significance of diverse linguistic categories for human cognition — the Categories project.

The two projects are united in their search for the cognitive infrastructure for human language – what are the faculties, largely independent of language itself, which nevertheless provide its foundations. They also share the method of using cross-linguistic data as evidence for universals and cultural specialisations, and the interactions between these.

This research involves work on languages around the world – especially the documentation of little described languages. The Institute houses the largest digital archive of such language material in the world. Understanding the sources of language diversity also requires understanding language prehistory, and the L&C Department has pioneered the application of bioinformatics to language typology.