2013-07-03

Conference on Oral Poetics and Cognitive Science

At a conference held at the School of Language and Literature at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies in January 2013, researchers met to discuss "Oral Poetics and Cognitive Science." The stated intention was to "lay the foundations of a new discipline, Cognitive Oral Poetics, through an interdisciplinary conversation between researchers in oral poetics, empirical literary scholars, linguists and cognitive scientists."

More from the program announcement:
The Parry-Lord research on oral composition in performance was arguably the major breakthrough in classics and oral tradition studies in the 20th century. The so called “cognitive revolution” has probably been the most important movement cutting across all the sciences of the mind for the past one hundred years, maybe more. Both paradigm shifts have an important point of coincidence: the idea that language learning and verbal creativity result from usage and performance, and build on general cognitive capacities and cultural context. The basic units of language and oral poetry are not a set of transformational or formal rules, but functional form-meaning pairs acquired through an instance-based process.

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