Luigi Rizzi - Nuove Prospettive in Antropologia ed Evoluzione 23

CONFERENCE New Perspectives in Anthropology and Evolution 23 Evolution and Diversity of Human Language from Prehistory to Modernity Description: In this conference, Professor Luigi Rizzi delves into the fundamental properties of human language, drawing on over seventy years of research in formal linguistics. Through a presentation covering the three universal properties of language—infinity, hierarchy, and movement—the professor illustrates how these characteristics are essential to all languages ​​and crucial for addressing any topic related to language, from its evolution to interactions with artificial intelligence and linguistic variation. The presentation aims to explore these key concepts to provide a solid foundation for understanding and analyzing language in various contexts, including evolutionary and technological ones. Key points of the presentation include: Infinity of Language: The human capacity to generate an infinite number of linguistic expressions was highlighted as a fundamental characteristic of language, highlighting how humans can produce and understand previously unheard sentences thanks to an innate computational mechanism. Structural Hierarchy: Language is organized hierarchically, not linearly. This organization is crucial to understanding linguistic phenomena, allowing us to analyze how words and sentences are combined in complex and structured ways. Movement: A property of language that refers to the discrepancy between the pronunciation position of certain linguistic expressions and their interpretation position. This concept plays a key role in the syntactic and semantic analysis of languages. Comparison with Artificial Intelligence: The talk explores the relationship between natural language and artificial intelligence, highlighting how some linguistic properties are easily acquired by children but still pose challenges for machines, as demonstrated by the ChatGPT experiment. Evolution of Language: The concept of recursive merging is discussed as the foundation of infinity and hierarchy in language, proposing a hierarchy of merger-based systems of increasing complexity. This analysis provides insights into ontogeny (language development in children) and phylogeny (evolution of human language compared to animal communication systems), demonstrating how human language is distinguished by its ability to create complex structures through recursive processes. *** The Institute of Human Paleontology, in collaboration with the Italian Institute of Anthropology and the University of Trento, and with the support of the Directorate-General for Education, Research, and Cultural Institutes, organized the conference "Evolution and Diversity of Human Language from Prehistory to Modernity" as part of the "New Perspectives in Anthropology and Evolution" series. Session 1 – Friday the 15th from 9:00 AM Andrea Parravicini (Unimi) Carlo Brentari (Unitn) Session 2 – Friday the 15th from 3:30 PM Giorgio Manzi (Uniroma1) Giovanni Destro Bisol (Uniroma1) Stefano Grimaldi (Unitn) Session 3 – Saturday the 16th from 9:00 AM Luigi Rizzi (Unisi/Collège de France) Federica Ricci Garotti (Unitn) Birgit Alber (Unibz) Ermenegildo Bidese (Unitn)