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Professor Simon Kirby FBA

The origins and evolution of language; the interactions between individual cognition, cultural transmission and biological evolution in human populations; art / science collaboration
Fellow type
UK Fellow
Year elected
2019
Subjects
Linguistics
Sections
Linguistics and Philology
Website
https://www.ed.ac.uk/profile/simon-kirby

Current post

Professor of Language Evolution, University of Edinburgh; Director of the Centre for Language Evolution, University of Edinburgh

Past appointments

University of Edinburgh Director of Graduate School in Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences

Publications

Language Evolution

Edited by Morten H. Christiansen and Simon Kirby - Published in 2003 by Oxford University Press

Function, Selection and Innateness

Simon Kirby - Published in 1999 by Oxford University Press

Contextual predictability shapes signal autonomy

James Winters, Simon Kirby and Kenny Smith - Published in 2018 by Cognition

Self domestication and the evolution of language

James Thomas and Simon Kirby - Published in 2018 by Biology and Philosophy

Culture and biology in the origins of linguistic structure

Simon Kirby - Published in 2017 by Psychon Bull Rev

Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation and the Principle of Least Effort: Language users optimise a miniature lexicon for efficient communication

Jasmeen Kanwal, Kenny Smith, Jennifer Culbertson and Simon Kirby - Published in 2017 by Cognition

Musical evolution in the lab exhibits rhythmic universals

Andrea Ravignani, Tania Delgado and Simon Kirby - Published in 2017 by Nature Human Behaviour

Culture shapes the evolution of cognition

Bill Thompson, Simon Kirby, and Kenny Smith - Published in 2016 by PNAS

Compression and communication in the cultural evolution of linguistic structure

Simon Kirby, Monica Tamariz, Hannah Cornish and Kenny Smith - Published in 2015 by Cognition

Cultural evolution of systematically structured behaviour in a non-human primate

Nicolas Claidière, Kenny Smith, Simon Kirby and Joël Fagot - Published in 2014 by Proceedings of the Royal Society of London

Other Fellows of the British Academy

Professor David Denison FBA

History of English, especially syntax, including current change; modelling syntactic change; word classes and word class boundaries, gradience in syntax; corpus construction and problems of tagging

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Professor Nigel Vincent FBA

Historical linguistics, Italian, Romance, Latin

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Professor Irina Nikolaeva FBA

General linguistics; linguistic diversity and linguistic typology; language change; Uralic, Altaic and Palaeosiberian languages and linguistics; documentation and description of endangered languages

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