Vortrag - First Words, Last Words: A Journey to the Edge of Language

We have a rich picture of the beginnings of language, thanks to decades of scientific research with children, infants, and even babies in the womb, yet we know next to nothing about how dying people communicate or even what a linguistics of the end of life would look like. In this presentation I discuss the asymmetries in cultural and scientific attention paid to first words and child language acquisition and to last words and language at the end of life. I will also present some relevant findings on end of life phenomena from the monologic and dyadic perspectives in order to suggest that a relevant developmental perspective for an end-of-life linguistics comes from the "interaction engine" (Levinson, 2006).