Hello BULA-ers,

Next Tuesday (October 18), the French linguist Dr. Pierre Pica will be giving a talk entitled "Human and Linguistic Diversity: Number and Geometry in Munduruku". In the talk, Dr. Pica will describe his fieldwork and research with the Munduruku, an indigenous people of Brazil. The Munduruku language is notable for having a very limited inventory of number words--briefly, the language has words that correspond to one, two, and many, and that's about it. In the last several years, Dr. Pica and several other researchers have been exploring the consequences of this impoverished vocabulary for the Munduruku people's ability to perform everyday numerical computations and reasoning. Their results are quite surprising, and also quite controversial. (For those of you familiar with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and linguistic determinism, his research directly relates to these questions.)

The talk should be quite interesting--Dr. Pica has agreed to present his work in a way that will be accessible to undergraduate students, and I'm sure that he'll have some thought-provoking things to say. As I mentioned above, the talk will occur on Tuesday, October 18 at 5pm, in CAS 224. I've attached the flyer for the talk, so that you can read more about it.

We hope to see you there!

Best, Pete