The scientometric landscape of Evolang: A comprehensive database of the Evolang conference

Abstract

Language evolution is a modern incarnation of a long intellectual tradition that addresses the fundamental question of how language began. Such a formulation is intuitively obvious, but a more precise characterisation of this area of research with its central notions—language and evolution—has proved surprisingly elusive. In this paper, we show how conceptual analysis can be complemented with scientometric analysis in describing language evolution. To this end, we built a database containing information on the contributions and contributors to the proceedings of the nine most recent iterations (years 2004–20) of the Evolang conference, which given its long history (1996–) and attendance rates gives a good reflection of the thematic scope and research trends in the field of language evolution as a whole. We present several analyses of these data, concerning the geographical distribution of the researchers contributing to the conference, a set of ‘classic’ references most frequently cited in Evolang proceedings, researcher profiles self-associated with the most popular tags for this area of research (such as ‘evolution of language’ vs. ‘language evolution’), and the changes to the profile of the conference as represented in the proportions of topics and author networks over the most recent Evolang iterations. While our resource is intended primarily as a source of insight into the Evolang conference—and by extension into the entire field of language evolution—it holds potential for comparisons with other fields and for addressing questions on the production of scientific knowledge.

Cognitive Linguistics and Language Evolution

“…But the term iterated learning has also come to refer to an approach that operationalizes this fundamental process of generational transmission via computer simulations or in the laboratory. Iterated learning is an approach that has proven particularly successful in language evolution researchin fact, scientometric analyses of abstracts from the pertinent conferences in the field have shown that it is among the most central topics in the field (e.g., Bergmann & Dale 2016;Wacewicz et al 2023b). The IL model was pioneered in Kirby's (2001) seminal computational simulation.…”

“…While questions from the domain of historical linguistics have long been seen as outside the scope of language evolution research, recent developments in the field suggest that their importance for understanding cultural evolution is acknowledged to an increasing extent. This is shown, for example, by the growing number of presentations for this domain at the most important conferences in the field (see, e.g., Gong et al 2014: 508;Wacewicz et al 2023b). Importantly, the relationship between language evolution research and historical linguistics can be seen as a bilateral one: on the one hand, insights from historical linguistics can prove relevant for language evolution research in that they reveal general processes of cultural evolution; on the other hand, accounts of language change make use of evolutionary concepts to account for historical processes (e.g., Croft 2000; see also Harder 2010).…”