the life logistic
This is the webpage for the Honours/MSc course Origins and Evolution of Language for 2021. The sections below give an overview of the course, including important links for weekly readings and tutorials and information on weekly pre-lecture quizzes. You will need to use Learn for links to lecture slides, weekly pre-lecture quizzes, and electronic submission course assessment.
Note that much of the text on this webpage is culturally evolved – originally written by Prof. Kenny Smith and Dr. James Winters, and modified by both Dr. Marieke Schouwstra and Dr. Christine Cuskley.
Dr. Matthew Spike (me!) is the course organiser and main lecturer. If you need to speak to someone about the course, you can email me or virtually-grab me after class (or during the break), I don’t keep office hours, but am available to meet (by appointment) Mon-Fri. My office is DSB 2.13. Note that I will generally only respond to emails during normal business hours, and I may not be able to respond immediately (read: almost never do at the best of times).
There is no lecture or tutorial in week 6; you should use this time to get a jump on independent study for your essay(s). Dr. Frank Mollica will be delivering a lecture on Grammaticalisation in week 9/lecture 8.
Your tutor will be either Amir Bin Mustaffa, Lauren Fletcher, or Vittoria Moresco, who are all PhD students here in PPLS/LEL at Edinburgh. You can email your tutor with questions about the course materials or tutorial exercises.
We have online lectures on Monday, 2.10pm-4pm on Teams.
The course includes one, one hour tutorial per week, starting in week 2. For honours students, groups have been assigned by the teaching office; if you would like to request a change of group, please do so here. If you are an MSc Student, you can self-enroll in a tutorial group on Learn via the ‘Group Sign up’ button which will be provided soon.
From week 3, some of the tutorials will take the form of “debates” where half of each tutorial group will read a different paper on the same general topic, and compare and contrast the approaches during the tutorial meeting. Attendance at tutorials is compulsory, not optional.
Attendance will be taken at each tutorial, and you are expected to attend all tutorials for the course. You should have received a notification of which tutorial group you will be in. The times and locations of each group are listed here for Honours students and here for MSc students.
If there are any remaining issues concerning the tutorial groups, please contact Matt Spike at mspike@ed.ac.uk.
Top Hat is “student engagement software”, which is an opaque way of saying it’s a platform for you to interact with the course material. We’ll be using it for both weekly reading quizzes (which you are required to complete).
Instructions for signing up to Top Hat via EASE are here. To get to the content for this course, you will need the join code which will be supplied in the next few days.
In order to encourage you to complete the reading and to allow you (and me) to check whether you actually understood it, you need to complete weekly reading quizzes on Top Hat. Quizzes will open immediately after the lecture and close at 10am the following Monday. Completion of these quizzes is compulsory for all students. The deadline is 1pm on Mondays. To sign up to TopHat, see the information above. To access the reading quizzes:
Below, the important points about the assessment will be highlighted on this page.
In general, it’s not a bad idea to check out this handy guide on how to write an essay, available on the PPLS student hub.
Also it’s an extremely good idea to make use of the fantastic Writing Centre.: this is where you can get the kind of skills and training which are normally assumed to be learned by osmosis, or possibly magic. For some reason, many people assume that this is some kind of remedial centre for substandard scholars, but this is very much not the case! Rather than being the university equivalent of the naughty step, the centre is an opportunity to get incredibly valuable feedback on how to plan, structure, and refine your written work - even better, this comes from current PhD students, not decrepit, world-weary lecturers. We recommend you use it as much as possible, and it’s worth noting that our internal stats indicate that students who use the service move up an average of one grade classification. Use it!
Further details on assignments in the next few days.
Further details on assignments in the next few days.
Do the readings before the associated lectures – lectures are designed to elaborate on the reading material, and will assume you have already read it before class and done the quiz, and you’ll be expected to talk about it. This is why the reading associated with the lecture in week 3 is listed under week 2, week 4 under week 3, etc. Do the reading ahead of the lecture, you will thank yourself later.
The course draws a lot of material from Fitch’s 2010 book The Evolution of Language, which is on reserve in the HUB section of the main library, and also available electronically (log into EASE, then go to DiscoverEd and search for it). It is also available to buy at Blackwell’s on Southbridge. The readings for each week are specified in the course schedule below, and will be made available each week. and listed (and linked) in each pre-reading. Aside from the Fitch text, readings are mostly journal articles which can also be accessed via DiscoverEd (after EASE login). The handful of readings unavailable in this way are already posted on Learn and/or linked from the pre-readings or tutorial debriefs.
This is a way to work collaboratively on annotating webpages and pdf documents with a group, as well as a way to make private annotations for yourself. Can you:
Below you will find week-by-week materials for the entire course.
Slides for each lecture will be posted both here and on Learn under Lecture Notes shortly after the lecture takes place. Note that these materials are subject to change depending on how we progress or other unforeseen factors, so please use these as a guide to look ahead to where we will be in a week or two at most. Pay attention during lectures, where I will flag any major or minor changes (however, note that the assessment will not change).
Lecture 2: Natural selection and adaptation
Not your tutorial reading, but a very influential piece from Gould and Lewontin which is worth skimming at least!
Also, since I talked about the amazing evolution of the eukaryotic cell in the lecture, here’s a short video about that.
Lecture 3: Animal communication, intention and structure
Lecture 4: Human evolution, social learning and cumulative culture
Lecture 10: Future directions
<!– [Slides] - [Tutorial: Wrap up](http://www.lel.ed.ac.