Space and Language Lecture two in the16th Annual Darwin Lecture Series

This week Dr Karen Emmorey of the Salk Institute, California comes to Darwin College, Cambridge to give the second talk in the annual Darwin Lecture series.

The theme for this year's lecture series is space, a choice in part inspired by Stanley Kubrick's seminal film 2001-A Space Odyssey. "It occurred to us that the theme of space would be at once timely and ideal for the series, as it has such different resonances in different fields," explains Francois Penz, a Fellow of Darwin College and one of the organisers of this year's lectures. "We have planned our intellectual journey from inner to outer space, with excursions into the brain, language, buildings, virtual reality, mapmaking, politics, astronautics, and cosmology."

The Darwin Lectures, a series of public lectures run in the second term of each academic year, were established in 1986 and quickly established themselves as one of the highlights of the University's yearly programme of public education.

Each series has been built around a single theme, approached in a multi-disciplinary way. Previous themes have included commmunications, intelligence, catastrophe and the environment. Each lecture is given by a leading authority on his or her subject. The list of distinguished speakers from previous years includes Stephen Hawking, Helena Kennedy, Jonathan Miller, Roger Penrose and Roy Porter.

Lecture two Friday 26 January
Space and Language
Dr Karen Emmorey (Salk Institute, California)

How do we talk about what we see? To linguistically represent and encode the visual world requires a crucial interface between language and spatial cognition. Most spoken languages encode spatial relations with prepositions (on, under) or locative suffixes (-lla, a case ending roughly meaning 'on' in Finnish). In contrast, signed languages convey spatial information using "classifier" constructions in which spatial relations are expressed by where the hands are placed in signing space or with respect to the body. There are no grammatical elements specifying spatial relations; rather, there is a schematic and isomorphic mapping between the location of the hands in signing space and the location of objects in real or imagined space. I will discuss the ramifications of this spatialized form of language for a) how speakers and signers talk about space, b) for how experience with sign language can enhance non-linguistic spatial cognitive abilities, and c) for the neural organization of signed and spoken languages.

Lecture programme
19 January Inner Space
Susan Greenfield (Department of Pharmacology, Oxford)

26 January Space and Language
Karen Emmorey (Salk Institute, California)

2 February Architectural Space
Daniel Libeskind (Berlin)

9 February Virtual Space
Char Davies (Montreal)

16 February Mapping Space
Lisa Jardine (School of English, University London)

23 February International Space
Neal Ascherson (London)

2 March Outer Space
John Barrow (Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Cambridge)

9 March Exploring Space
Jeffrey Hoffman (NASA, Paris)

The lectures will start at 5.30 pm in The Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue. An adjacent overflow theatre is provided with live TV coverage. Each lecture is typically attended by 600 people, so it is advisable to arrive around half an hour early to ensure a place.

Further information To find out more about the lecture series go to the events section on the Darwin College website.