Link to Symposium Website: http://www.dcs.qmul.ac.uk/research/imc/music-lang/

With the conventional assumption that language ability has to be explained by characterising languages wholly separately from how they are used, for a long time now there has been a divide between explanations of language as a system (language competence) and explanations of language use (performance). Nonetheless, in socio-linguistics, pragmatics, and historical linguistics, it has always been assumed that explanations of social aspects of language and language change have to make reference to how language is used in social interactions. Things are however now changing.

Since the turn of the century, psychologists, and those working on core properties of language – semanticists, syntacticians, phoneticians – have increasingly been exploring different versions of the view that the language has to be seen as grounded in terms of participant interaction. Strikingly, over the same period, there has been parallel work emerging in music theory arguing that music is grounded in participant interaction; and there are clear points of contact between these two research directions. To draw these research trends together, this event gathers representatives of these groups to explore issues relating to human interaction raised by their research, with the goal of exploring the consequences of seeing both language and music as mechanisms for interaction.