The 11th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (Evolang 11) was hosted at the Lavin-Bernick Center for University Life at Tulane University in New Orleans, LA, USA, from 21 March to 24 March 2016. The University of Southern Mississippi organised the conference, with Heidi Lyn as Chair of the local organising committee. Over 200 delegates gathered for this second American Evolang, and were treated not only to a wide range of current research in language origins and evolution, but also to local ‘NOLA’ food and culture as well. Evolang hosted a reception at Mardi Gras World—a stylised warehouse storing numerous Mardi Gras floats and costumes, where guests were serenaded with a brass band and committee members threw beads into the amused, cocktail-sipping crowd. The conference banquet was held at the colonial-era-style Audubon Tea Room with live jazz and a swing dancing lesson led by Thom Scott-Phillips. Post-conference events included a ghost tour, swamp tours, and a plantation tour. This was the 20th anniversary of the very first Evolang, held in Edinburgh in 1996, and saw the release of the first issue of the Journal of Language Evolution . With a 20-year history, it is hardly surprising that there has been a strong ‘self-reflective’ tendency at recent Evolang conferences, as witnessed, for example, in the ‘Perspectives on Evolang’ section in the proceedings of Evolang 10 (Cartmill et al. 2014), as well as in some of the contributions in the first issue of JoLE (Dediu and de Boer 2016; Hammarstrom 2016). Something that is repeatedly mentioned in these publications is the observation that ‘work on language evolution has become much more rigorous: we are discovering methods by which questions we could formerly only speculate about can now be investigated empirically’ (de Boer 2014). These ‘self-reflective’ tendencies were also exemplified …

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Evolang 11 会议报告

第 11 届语言进化国际会议（Evolang 11）于 2016 年 3 月 21 日至 24 日在美国路易斯安那州新奥尔良杜兰大学拉文-伯尼克大学生活中心举行。会议，海蒂·林 (Heidi Lyn) 担任当地组委会主席。200 多名代表齐聚一堂，参加第二届美国 Evolang，他们不仅接受了当前广泛的语言起源和进化研究，还了解了当地的“NOLA”饮食和文化。Evolang 在 Mardi Gras World 举办了一场招待会——这是一个风格化的仓库，存放着许多 Mardi Gras 花车和服装，在那里客人们会听到铜管乐队的小夜曲，委员会成员向喝着鸡尾酒的逗乐人群扔珠子。会议宴会在殖民时代风格的奥杜邦茶室举行，现场爵士乐和汤姆·斯科特·菲利普斯（Thom Scott-Phillips）带领的摇摆舞课程。会后活动包括幽灵之旅、沼泽之旅和种植园之旅。这是 1996 年在爱丁堡举行的第一届 Evolang 20 周年，并见证了第一期语言进化杂志的发行。拥有 20 年的历史，在最近的 Evolang 会议上出现强烈的“自我反思”趋势也就不足为奇了，例如，在 Evolang 10 (Cartmill et al. 2014)，以及第一期 JoLE 的一些贡献（Dediu 和 de Boer 2016；Hammarstrom 2016）。这些出版物中反复提到的观察结果是“关于语言进化的工作变得更加严格：我们正在发现以前只能推测的问题现在可以通过经验研究的方法”（de Boer 2014）。这些“自我反省”的倾向也体现了……