Speaker
Description
In Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of Our First and Last Words (2025), I addressed the following asymmetry in the language sciences: while they are richly endowed with models of language’s beginnings, they have not paid sufficient attention to how language ends for individuals, which means that language across the lifespan has never truly been explored. In this talk, I inquire into the sources of this asymmetry from different angles and present the concept of the “interaction window,” the abstract social space in which humans interact with each other, as a conceptual tool for balancing out scientific attention. In the words of ancient Greek physician Alkmeon of Croton, “human beings perish because they are not able to join their beginning to their end.” Alkmeon meant that the human lifespan is not a cycle, but it also points to the value of creating models of both the beginnings and the ends of phenomena like language that involve the individual and the species, the self and the body, and organic abilities and cultural expectation.