Workshop 'How Spatial is Dialect Syntax?'

Date: 23-Nov-2011 - 25-Nov-2011
Location: Lisbon, Portugal
Contact Person: Ernestina Carrilho

Linguistic Fields: Historical Linguistics; Sociolinguistics; Syntax

Call Deadline: 12-Jun-2011

Meeting Description:

The workshop is organized by the CORDIAL team (research group Dialectology and Diachrony at Centre of Linguistics of the University of Lisbon - CLUL) as part of the International Symposium on Limits and Areas in Dialectology.

The prolific development of dialect syntax over the last two decades widened up the space for dialectology and linguistic theory to meet. The rise and expansion of several national projects and transnational networks on this research domain led to the systematic study of syntactic properties of dialects, which brought to light a sharper awareness of syntactic variation and of its areal extent.

While the theoretical impact of dialect syntax continues to renew the debate about the grammatical locus for variation, this workshop calls for contributions addressing the spatial dimension of so-called syntactic variation. The main objective is to provide a forum for researchers to present results from recent projects and discuss issues and challenges pertaining to the geolinguistic import of dialect syntax, together with its theoretical, empirical and methodological implications.

Invited Speaker:
Sjef Barbiers (Meertens Institute, Amsterdam)

Call for Papers:
We welcome paper submissions addressing (but not limited to) the following topics:

• Geographical boundaries in dialect syntax
• Geolinguistic patterns in the areal distribution of syntactic variants
• Definition and identification of dialectal syntactic variants
• Geographical space as a grammar-external factor for syntactic variation
• Grammatical loci of 'syntactic' variables
• Spatial and grammatical correlations between syntactic variants and between syntactic variables
• Idiolectal and dialectal syntactic variation
• Intra-speaker and dialectal syntactic variation
• Methodological challenges/advances in dialect syntax fieldwork
• Cartographic representation of syntactic variables and variants
• Tools for dialect syntax

Abstract Submission:
Abstracts should be anonymous and restricted to one page (using 2,5 cm margins on all sides, single line spacing and 11pt font size), to be submitted as an attachment by e-mail. Acceptable formats for attachments are MS Word and PDF. The following information should be included in the body of the message: name of author(s), affiliation, title of abstract, postal address, e-mail address. Authors may submit up to two abstracts, one individual and one jointly authored. Presentations will be allotted 30 minutes, followed by 10 minutes for discussion.

Important Dates:
Deadline for abstract submission: June 12, 2011
Notification of acceptance: July 15, 2011

For more information, please contact the organizers at: cordialworkshop@clul.ul.pt

(from the Linguist List)