Conference: Tromsø International Conference on Language Diversity

Dates: 6–8 November 2013
Organizers: Tromsø University
Contact: Øystein Vangsnes
Web-page: http://en.uit.no/tavla/artikkel/320146/tromso_international_conferance_on_language_diver
Deadline for submission: May 1, 2013
Notification of acceptance: Early June 2013

Confirmed keynote speakers include:
Kenneth R. Beesley, SAP Labs, Salt Lake City, USA
Raphael Berthele, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
Ellen Bialystok, York University, Canada
Kendall King, University of Minnesota, USA
Elana Shohamy, Tel Aviv University, Israel


A central objective of the conference is to bring together research and policy making in the area of language diversity. Keynote speakers will include academics, politicians and public administrators, and at this point the following plenary speakers have confirmed their presence:

Abstracts for general session papers and proposals for workshops are invited by the submission deadline 1st May 2013.

Background

The Tromsø International Conference on Language Diversity will be one of the seven main events during Språkåret 2013, the Norwegian national Language Year 2013, which marks both the 200th anniversary of the Norwegian linguist and poet Ivar Aasen and the 100th anniversary of Det Norske Teatret (‘The Norwegian Theater’). Språkåret 2013 aims to be a generous and inclusive celebration of language diversity.

Language is the most important defining characteristic of human beings. Yet, language comes in a multitude of forms, and differences across languages and variation within them affect society and the lives of individuals in a number of ways. Why don't we all speak the same? Why do some societies manage well with several languages whereas others do not? Why are regional languages promoted in some areas and why are minority languages suppressed in others? How is cognitive development in children affected by growing up with two rather than just one language – or with two dialects rather than just one? Do language issues affect the health of a population? Does language diversity constitute a security challenge in certain circumstances? Is the ability to understand closely related linguistic varieties desirable, and if so, should it be promoted through political measures? 

The questions are numerous and the central purpose of the conference is to highlight them and bring together research and policy making in discussing the assets and challenges regarding language diversity. Thematically the conference will focus on three main areas: cognitive and developmental aspects of language diversity, its impact on society in general, and language technology. There will be a combination of parallel sessions/workshops, plenary talks and panel debates, and we envisage discussions on issues such as the economic and societal benefits of language diversity, language diversity in education, language diversity as cultural heritage, the future of language diversity in language technology, etc.

Submission guidelines

Session papers

Abstracts are invited for 30-minute presentations (including discussion) on any topic concerning language diversity. We strongly encourage papers that highlight issues that bear on the societal and political relevance of language diversity. 

Abstracts should not exceed 500 words and 1 page in length (excluding references). 

Workshops

We are also soliciting organizers for workshops on various topics that highlight societal implications and aspects of language diversity, and the following non-exhaustive list gives an impression of relevant topics.

- Language diversity and universal design

- Language, discrimination and mental health

- Machine translation and minority languages

- Bilingualism and education

- Bilingualism versus bidialectalism

- Language revitalization

- Historical minority languages in Europe

- Minority language as an asset in tourism

- Minority languages and language technology

- Language diversity and economy

Workshop proposals may be of two kinds:

1. Thematic workshops with a series of at most six 30-minute paper presentations. One or two of the slots may be used for general discussion. Upon submission of the proposal, the workshop organizers should provide a description of the workshop and include a list of speakers with paper titles. The workshop should be open to all participants at the conference, and the time slots must follow the time slots for the general sessions. The proposal should be no more than two A4 pages in length.

2. General discussion/panel sessions lasting one and a half hours. Proposals for such short workshops should include a description of the topic and a list of at least four participants and their area of expertise relevant to the topic. The proposed session must be open to all conference participants. The proposal should be no more than one A4 page in length. 

For both kinds of workshops, prospective organizers are strongly urged to get in touch with the conference organizers in due time before the submission deadline in order to get feedback on the feasibility of the proposal. Proposals that include participation from both research and politics/public administration are most welcome. 

Submission

The deadline for submission is 1st May 2013 at midnight Central European Time. All submissions should be made through the EasyChair system by following this link https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=tromslang2013. 

Contributors will be notified by early June 2013 about the outcome of the review process, and a program for the conference will be launched as soon as possible thereafter. 

Important dates

1 May – Deadline for submission of abstracts (papers and workshops)

Early June – Notification of acceptance

Late June – Program launch and registration opens

1 October – Registration deadline

6-8 November – Conference takes place

Further information about practical matters, side events and so forth will be put out on the conference web site in due time. The organizers of the conference can be contacted at tromslang2013@hsl.uit.no.

Call for papers: MULTIMEDIALECTRANSLATION

5th Conference of the translation of dialects in multimedia 

UNIVERSITY OF TURKU (FINLAND) 3-5 May 2012

 The conference is directed at academics from various disciplines as well as translators and students who are interested in the translation of dialects in multimedia contexts. The conference will concentrate on a complex, interdisciplinary subject area involving linguistics, communication studies, film studies and translation studies as well as other areas of cultural studies, sociology and other disciplines. The main topics to be covered at the conference include dubbing, subtitling films in dialect and linguistic varieties; theatre translation; cultural transfer processes in the characteristics of dialects; archaisms, regionalisms, varieties in the continuum between dialect and standard language; diglossia (national language and regional or local language; “official” and “non official” language); the use of new technologies in the translation of dialect. To these areas the Host Committee welcomes proposals for 20-minute papers.

• Papers are welcome in the conference languages indicated. 
• Papers presented in languages other than English will require a further abstract in English to be distributed as a hand-out during their presentation. 
• Conference languages: English, German, Italian, Finnish, Swedish, French. 
• The deadline for sending abstracts in one of the official Conference languages AND in English (500 words) is 29 February, 2012 
• The Scientific Committee will return its decision around 30th march

More information here: http://mmdtgroup.net/2011/05/23/call-for-papers/

Workshop on comparing approaches to measuring linguistic differences

24-25 October 2011, University of Gothenburg 

Since the introduction of lexicostatistics in the 1950s, researchers have been investigating methods for the grouping of languages and dialects. The input for these methods are relevant abstractions of linguistic data (most often based on fixed lists of senses, e.g., the Swadesh lists).

The abstractions are traditionally character-based (as in work by Swadesh, Dyen, Ringe, Warnow, Gray and many others), which can be said to define distances on the level of languages. In these approaches, a particular item either is or is not present in a language.

More recently, drawing on advances in computer software and hardware, methods aiming at measuring and aggregating distances among individual linguistic items have been explored (as in work by Kessler, Wichmann, Nerbonne, Kondrak, McMahon and others). In these approaches, individual items are (dis)similar to some quantifiable degree between two languages.

A number of such methods for measuring linguistic differences have been proposed in the literature, but so far, researchers have mostly explored individual methods. Some authors have made explicit comparisons among some of the methods (e.g., Kessler, Kondrak, Nerbonne), but this aspect is still largely unexplored.

There is also a need to contrast the more recent automatic methods with a more traditional historical- comparative methodology (e.g. as recently surveyed and critiqued by Campbell and Poser), which generally draws on a broader range of linguistic phenomena than have so far been used with the automatic approaches, including semantic and grammatical characteristics.

This two-day workshop, arranged by the Swedish Languagde Bank, University of Uppsala and University of Leipzig, is intended as a forum to discuss these issues in more depth.

Venue 
The workshop will take place in Gothenburg, in the Faculty of Arts building at the University of Gothenburg.

Register at this link at the latest October, 12th.

N'CLAV Grand Meeting in Gottskär, Day 3

The third day of the meeting started off with invited speaker Leoni Cornips from Meertens Institute/Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her talk "DO-support (?) in Dutch standard and non-standard adult and child speech" addressed DO-support as a dummy auxiliary and other uses of DO in Dutch. Cornips pointed out that research on the phenomena has oftentimes been simplified because linguists have ignored non-standard uses of aux+inf in adult standard Dutch and cases in which aux+inf structures in child languages and regional varieties of Dutch cannot be analyzed as having a dummy auxiliary DO.

Janne Bondi Johannessen and Piotr Garbacz

Next up were talks from Janne Bondi Johannesson and Piotr Garbacz - on the preproprial article in Norwegian, Swedish and Danish - and Tanya Karoli Christensen and Torben Juel Jensen - on the word order in Danish subordinate clauses, and on problems that can arise when categorical theories meet actual language use data. Ásta Svavarsdóttirs talk followed, the subject of which was methodology and using more than one method in the study of a single linguistic feature, the Icelandic "dative-sickness" serving as a demonstration case.

After a lunch break, Pål Kristian Eriksen spoke about rich tense systems (Norwegian) and poor tense systems (Russian), and gave a formal analysis of the Russian tense system in the light of the Norwegian one, based on pragmatic notions such as topic and focus. Björn Lundqvist, the last speaker of the day, gave a talk on get-passives titled "Where Voice meets Modality: The Agentive Get-Passive as a modal construction".

Øystein Vangsnes 

This was followed by a presentation of project reports, and then the schedule said "Afternoon activities", which meant many things. For some, it meant playing miniature golf, for some partaking in a "walking"-tour on Gottskär and its history. For others the afternoon involved driving to Landvetter airport and then hiding from the rain with a crossword puzzle. The night ended with dinner and much singing for all.

Filippa Lindahl

The participants of N'CLAV Grand Meeting 2011

N'CLAV Grand Meeting in Gottskär, Day 2

Therese Leinonen giving her talk Tuesday morning.
(Photo: Anders Eriksson)

Tuesday August 23rd, 2011

Day 2 of the N’CLAV Grand Meeting opened with a session of talks with a sociolinguistic perspective on Nordic dialects. First of these was invited speaker Sally Boyd’s talk on the language practices of young people in multilingual urban settings in Sweden, followed by Jenny Nilsson, talking about dialect contact in West Sweden (i.e. the regions Bohuslän and Västergötland), and Therese Leinonen on Finland-Swedish dialect leveling and regionalization in the Åboland area on the coast of Finland. 

Before lunch Øystein Vangsnes delivered a memorial speech to long-time ScanDiaSyn participant Gunnar Hrafn Hrafnbjargarson, who passed away in a drowning accident earlier this summer.

Quiz master Pål K. Eriksen had no mercy.

After lunch the topic matter turned towards syntax, with Margrét Guðmundsdóttir giving a talk on the phonology and syntax of Icelandic, Jeffrey Parrot on case allomorphy in pronouns in Danish and Swedish, Kristin Eide on whether medieval Nordic immigration to England lead to a change in the tense and finiteness system of English, and finally Elisabeth Engdahl on methodological and theoretical issues connected to certain dependent constructions in the Nordic syntactic judgment database.

At the end of the day the group leaders met for discussion, while the other participants enjoyed their time off, e.g. going for walks in the beautiful Gottskär land – and townscape (see photos below), some even enjoying a bath in the sea. We had an excellent dinner at the conference site, and for entertainment after dinner we had a quiz on various trivia, a mix of popular culture, science and linguistics.

/Pål K. Eriksen

Sedum. (Photo: Marit Julien)

Gottskär harbour. (Photo: Marit Julien)

(Photo: Marit Julien)

Onsala landscape. (Photo: Marit Julien)

N'CLAV Grand Meeting in Gottskär, Day 1

Monday August 22nd, 2011
The N'CLAV Grand Meeting in Gottskär outside Göteborg is now in process. Some 35 members of the network gathered by and by during the Monday afternoon and Gottskär greeted us all with an extremely beautiful summer evening, which we chose to leave to take part in the two initial talks of this second grand meeting of the N'CLAV Network.

In the first of these talks, Janne Bondi Johannessen and Signe Laake of the University of Oslo challenged a common opinion that Norwegian spoken in the USA, American Norwegian, is "old-fashioned". They showed from a comparison of their material of spoken American Norwegian and corpora of contemporary Norwegian that there is some ground to this statement. The vocabulary in American Norwegian is indeed more like the dialect spoken by the generation of the parents of the immigrants than contemporary Norwegian, but when it comes to grammar, there is not so much difference.

After this, the first of four invited speakers, Anders Eriksson presented the work with the project Swedia 2000 – a Swedish dialect database. Methods, results and organisation of the work was discussed. There is already a small public database at http://swedia.ling.gu.se with dialect data presented as transcriptions of spoken dialectal Swedish, translations to standard Swedish and sound files. This public database is a sample of the much larger research database of the project, consisting of recordings of more than 1300 speakers representing 107 Swedish dialects that will be launched soon. The recordings in the database are of two kinds, one controlled part where all speakers produce the same words for instance, and one part with spontaneous speech.

One of the methodological concerns that Anders Eriksson mentioned was the difficulty to ensure consistency when so many different people work with the transcription. One of the tools that the transcribers made use of, Eriksson told us, was a reference tool for the phonetic transcriptions, where they could listen to samples of for instance a vowel sound and compare with the dialect sample they were currently transcribing.

The research database of variation in Swedish dialects is at present work in progress, but researchers may get access to it quite soon, so stay posted at http://swedat.ling.gu.se where you find information about the project and the database, and also other things, as for instance a high quality map to download and use when you work with the material.

The day ended with a nice dinner at Gottskär Kurs & Konferens, after which we walked in the dark August night to our different lodgings.

/Maia

N'CLAV Grand Meeting 2011 – Preliminary programme

A preliminary programme for the N'CLAV Grand Meeting 2011 has now been posted at the conference website.

The conference starts at 16:00 Monday August 22nd and ends with lunch by noon Thursday August 25th.

/Maia

Konferens om och kurs i dialektgeografi

Svensk dialektgeografi
2011-11-24 - 2011-11-24
Välkommen till Svenska litteratursällskapets seminarium "Svensk dialektgeografi" torsdagen den 24 november 2011 kl. 11–18.

http://www.kgaa.nu/konferens.php?id=8

Språkvetenskapliga nämnden och Språkarkivet vid SLS arrangerar i samarbete med Kungl. Gustav Adolfs Akademien för svensk folkkultur den 24 november 2011 ett seminarium om svensk dialektgeografi. Föredragshållarna kommer från både Finland och Sverige. Seminariet äger rum på Svenska litteratursällskapet, Riddaregatan 5 i Helsingfors, och är öppet för studenter, lärare och forskare. Mer information följer i början av september, men pricka redan nu in den 24 november i din kalender. Sprid gärna information om seminariet på din institution!

I anslutning till seminariet anordnas en kurs i att framställa dialektgeografiska kartor.

Språkarkivet, Språkvetenskapliga nämnden och Kungl. Gustav Adolfs Akademien för svensk folkkultur

Kontaktpersoner:
Pamela Gustavsson
Förste arkivarie vid Språkarkivet
pamela.gustavsson@sls.fi

Sofie Henricson
Språkvetenskapliga nämndens forskare och sekreterare
sofie.henricson@sls.fi

Marit Åhlén
Akademiintendent vid Kungl. Gustav Adolfs Akademien för svensk folkkultur
info@kgaa.nu

Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland

N'CLAV Grand Meeting 2011: Speakers

Welcome to Gothenburg and Gottskär, August, 22–25, 2011

We are happy to invite you to the beautiful west coast of Sweden in August for the second Grand Meeting of the N'CLAV Network. Below you find information about the speakers and the talks.
/N'CLAV, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

More information about the Grand Meeting

You find more information about the Grand Meeting at the conference website:
http://spraakbanken.gu.se/swe/nclav/activities/grand-meeting-2011
See also the previous blog post about the meeting:
http://nclav.blogspot.com/2011/02/nclav-grand-meeting-2011.html

Invited speakers:

• Leonie Cornips (Amsterdam): title t.b.a.
  
• Bert Vaux (Cambridge): title t.b.a.
  
• Camilla Wide (Turku): title t.b.a.
  
• Sally Boyd (Gothenburg): Language practices of young people in multilingual urban settings in Sweden: (multi-)ethnolect, variety, style or what?
  
• Anders Eriksson (Gothenburg): title t.b.a.
  

Other talks:

• Björn Bihl, Karlstad university, Sweden: title t.b.a
  
• Tanya Karoli Christensen & Torben Juel Jensen, LANCHART, University of Copenhagen, Denmark: Language use data meet categorical theory - the case of word order in Danish subordinate clauses
  
• Elisabet Engdahl, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden: Eliciting judgments on context dependent constructions
  Kristin Melum Eide, University of Trondheim, Norway: Did we break English?
  
• Pål Kristian Eriksen, University of Trondheim, Norway: Poor languages, rich languages, and the way to equality: How to analyze a poor tense system (Russian) in light of a rich tense system (Norwegian).
  
• Janne Bondi Johannessen & Signe Laake, The Text Laboratory, ILN, and ILOS, University of Oslo, Norway: The Norwegian Language of the American Midwest: Old-fashioned and standardised towards Bokmål?
  
• Janne Bondi Johannessen & Piotr Garbacz, The Text Laboratory, ILN, University of Oslo, Norway: Preproprial articles in Mainland Scandinavian
  
• Marit Julien, Lund university, Sweden: Predicative definite NPIs in Norwegian
  
• Ida Larsson, University of Oslo, Norway: Different ways of getting things done. On the readings of få ‘get’ in Scandinavian
  
• Therese Leinonen, Society of Swedish literature in Finland: Dialect leveling and regionalization in Åboland
  
• Björn Lundquist, University of Tromsø, CASTL, Norway: Where Voice meets Modality: the Agentive Get-Passive as a modal construction
  
• Jenny Nilsson, Institute for language and folklore, Gothenburg, Sweden: Something old, something new – Dialect contact in West Sweden
  
• Jeffrey K. Parrott, DGCSS, University of Copenhagen, Denmark: Case allomorphy and variation in Danish and Swedish
  
• Inger Schoonderbeek Hansen, University of Aarhus, Denmark: title t.b.a.
  

European Dialect Syntax Workshop 5 – EDISYN 5

Date: 25-Jun-2011 - 25-Jun-2011
Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands
Contact: Sjef Barbiers
Contact Email: Sjef.Barbiers[at]meertens.knaw.nl
Meeting URL: http://www.cgsw26.nl

The fifth European Dialect Syntax Workshop on
June 25th follows the CGSW 26 (Comparative Germanic Syntax).

Invited speaker: Rafaella Zanuttini (Yale)

PROGRAMME:
9:00-10:00 Raffaella Zanuttini (Yale University) - tba
Break
10:30-11:10 Mélanie Jouitteau (CNRS). When reduplication gives a choice
11:10-11:50 Ricardo Etxepare (IKER/CNRS). Evidentials and evidential strategies in Basque
11:50-12:30 Bjorn Lundquist (University of Tromsø). When input fails to determine the grammar: Regional vs. Non-regional variation in Norwegian and Swedish
Lunch
14:00-14:40 Ioanna Sitaridou (University of Cambridge). Syntactic microvariation in complementation strategies in Pontic Greek varieties
14:40-15:20 Anne Dagnac (Université Toulouse 2). Generalized C-doubling in an Oïl dialect, subjects and the nature of que2
15:20-16:00 Antonio Civardi (University of Florence). Cross-dialectal variation in Northern Russian: the ‘perfect’ with past passive participle
Break
16:40-17:20 Melani Wratil (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena). Double Agreement in the Alpine Languages
17:20-18:00 Roberta D'Alessandro (LUCL, Leiden University). Agreement in Upper Southern Italian Dialects: A new typology for Romance

The Edisyn 5 program, with links to abstracts, is availabe at www.cgsw26.nl.

Svenskans beskrivning 2011: Språket som kulturbärare – nu och då

Trettioandra sammankomsten för svenskans beskrivning äger rum torsdagen den 13 och fredagen den 14 oktober 2011. Sammankomsten beräknas börja ca kl. 10 på torsdagen och sluta senast kl. 16 på fredagen. Temat för konferensen är Språket som kulturbärare – nu och då. Värd är Svenska språket vid Karlstads universitet. 

Plenarföredragen kommer att behandla språket som kulturbärare i ett såväl historiskt som nutida perspektiv. Plenarföredragshållarna är: 

- Per-Axel Wiktorsson, Uppsala universitet – ”Mer ljus på fornsvenskan” 

- Margareta Svahn, Institutet för språk och folkminnen – ”Kontinuitet och förändring i västsvenska dialekter” 

- Stefan Brink, University of Aberdeen – ”De nordiska språkens påverkan på ortnamnskicket i Storbritannien” 

Konferensen kommer på sedvanligt vis att innehålla både plenar- och sektionsföredrag. De sistnämnda kan omfatta alla områden inom ämnet svenska. Vi avser att publicera ett urval av föredragen i en konferensvolym. 

Det kommer att finnas möjligheter att ge posterpresentationer och att arrangera workshops. Skulle någon vilja behandla ett specialområde i form av en workshop bör arrangörerna kontaktas i god tid, senast 30 april 2011.  

Det preliminära tidsschemat är följande: 

• Senast 1 juni 2011: Anmälan om deltagande och anmälan av föredrag med en kort sammanfattning om högst en A4-sida. Deltagarlista och sammanfattningar av föredragen läggs ut efter hand på hemsidan. 
• Senast 29 augusti 2011: Besked till deltagarna om antagna föredrag. 
• Omkring 12 september 2011: Utskick till deltagarna med sammankomstens program. 

Information finns tillgänglig på vår hemsida på Internet under adressen: www.kau.se/svebe32. Där kommer du att kunna göra du din anmälan elektroniskt. Du är välkommen att kontakta oss på e-postadressen Svbe32@kau.se om du har några frågor. Vi finns även på Facebook. 

Svenska språket vid Karlstads universitet hälsar alla varmt välkomna! 

Björn Bihl och Jessica Eriksson 

N'CLAV Grand Meeting 2011

THE 2nd N'CLAV GRAND MEETING

22–25 August, 2011

University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Conference website: 

t.b.a. (Network site: < http://spraakbanken.gu.se/nclav> Blog site: <http://nclav.blogspot.com>)

Conference e-mail: 

nclavnetwork "at" gmail.com

Conference venue: 

Gottskärs Kurs- och Konferens, Onsala, Sweden, close to Gothenburg

Invitation for papers: 

see below

We are happy to invite network members and associates of N'CLAV (Nordic Collaboration on Language Variation studies) to take part in the 2nd N'CLAV Grand Meeting at Gottskär, outside of Göteborg.  The programme will include: 

• invited talks by Leonie Cornips (Amsterdam), Bert Vaux (Cambridge), Camilla Wide (Turku), Anders Eriksson (Gothenburg).
• scientific papers by  senior and junior members 
• a theme session on "Meetings", see below
• status reports from projects

THEME

The theme of the conference will be  "Meetings" in a very broad sense: meetings between theories, between linguistic varieties, between people and so forth. Otherwise the grand meeting open to all kinds of talk in theoretical, descriptive and applied linguistics focussing on different kinds of variation across the Nordic languages.

FUNDING

Two participants from each N'CLAV node will be sponsored by the network, but the meeting is also open for participants with their own funding. We have applied for additional funds and hope to be able to contribute to travel and/or accommodation costs for more participants. 

INVITATION FOR PAPERS

We invite everyone who is interested in participating to send in an abstract describing the work to be presented, see below.

Abstracts (one A4 page + references) are invited by 28 March 2011. Please submit your abstract to the conference e-mail (above) as a pdf  or  plain text file. The abstracts are NOT to be anonymous.  

A preliminary programme will be sent out around 15 April 2011.  

N'CLAV especially encourages young researchers (i.e. PhD/MA students and postdocs) to send in abstracts.

Welcome to Gothenburg and Gottskär!

Maia Andréasson

and the Gothenburg node of N'CLAV

Workshop December 10th – 11th 2010: Verb Movement: Its nature, triggers, and effects

Deadline for submissions: 13-Oct-2010

Verb Movement: Its nature, triggers, and effects

NORMS (Nordic Center of Excellence in Microcomparative Syntax) and The University of Amsterdam are jointly organizing a workshop on verb movement in Amsterdam, December 10-11, 2010.

Date: 10-Dec-2010 - 11-Dec-2010
Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands
Contact Person: Kristine Bentzen
Meeting Email: vm...@hsl.uit.no
Web Site:
http://castl.uit.no/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=166:...
atid=76:conferencesaworkshops


Organizing Committee:
Kristine Bentzen (Tromsø), Thórhallur Eythórsson and Höskuldur Thráinsson (Iceland), Hedde Zeijlstra and Olaf Koeneman (Amsterdam)
Invited speakers include:
Jan-Wouter Zwart (Groningen) Winfried Lechner (Athens) Ora Matushansky (Utrecht) Klaus Abels (UCL) Theresa Biberauer (Cambridge)

Meeting Description: In this workshop we want to address various issues related to verb placement and the syntax of the left periphery. The topic 'verb movement' has of course been discussed extensively in the linguistic literature, but many of the core properties of verb movement still trigger intense debates and we think it is about time to try to determine what the main issues are and take a new look at them through 2010 goggles. For one thing, the empirical basis for traditional verb movement analyses has mainly consisted of (standard varieties of) Germanic and Romance languages, in particular English, German, Dutch, Scandinavian, and French. However, more detailed knowledge about other languages and dialects has enlarged the empirical basis. One such example is the extensive work on European dialects conducted in the last decade or so, partly in research groups that have been a part of the NORMS project or associated with it. These new data challenge the traditional view of verb movement as simply V-to-C or V-to-I. On the theoretical side, one issue concerns the 'explosion' of the CP and IP domains. Since (among others) Pollock (1989), Rizzi (1997), and Cinque (1999) it is commonly assumed that the structure of the CP and IP domains is much more fine-grained than we previously thought, with several functional projections in each domain. As a result, for example 'V-to-C' can no longer be assumed to be one single phenomenon; rather, we need to consider e.g. V-to-Fin, V-to-Foc, V-to-Top, V-to-Force, etc. as variants of what used to be labeled 'V-to-C'. Likewise, 'V-to-I' could mean V-to-Asp, V-to-T, V-to-Mod, etc. Another theoretical issue that is still under debate is the nature of the movement operation itself. Traditionally, verb movement has of course been analysed as head movement, but during the last decade or more, many people have explored phrasal movement alternatives such as remnant movement to account for verb movement. Related to this is the question of what triggers verb movement. The long-standing view that verbal morphology is a trigger for verb movement has been challenged in recent years, but the debate on this issue has by no means come to an end. Finally, the potential semantic effects of verb movement is also an issue that deserves more scrutiny.

Call For Papers: We invite abstracts of papers related to all questions listed in the workshop description. One person can submit at most one abstract as a sole author and one as co-author. Abstracts should be anonymous, in form of a PDF file, at most 2 pages in length, including examples and references, using a 12 pt. font with 2.5 cm (or 1 inch) margins on all sides. We consider only online submissions. Please upload your anonymous abstract online here: http://linguistlist.org/confcustom/customhome.cfm?emeetingid=0602J84658B67E5A408040441

Field work in Copenhagen, March 28th – April 1st, 2010

Deadline for registration: November 1st 2010

N'CLAV field work in Copenhagen: Language variation in an urban setting

The Copenhagen field work will focus on language variation in a late modern urban setting ex ploiting primarily sociolinguistic methodology. Today, most Scandinavian cities exhibit a high de gree of linguistic diversity, where variation is difficult to capture in terms of traditional sociolects or dialects: New linguistic features have emerged and old ones are used in new ways. Moreover, stylistic practices of the late modern society make it necessary for the student of linguistic variation to include intra-individual variation, the social meaning of variation and locally defined social categories in the scope of the field work.

The 5 days of field work is organized by the N’CLAV Copenhagen group and includes a two day seminar on sociolinguistic methodology and a concluding discussion concerning the question “What are linguistic data?”. The rest of the field work comprises hands-on activities during which the participants collect data in central Copenhagen exploiting sociolinguistic methodology.

The participants will be accommodated in central Copenhagen, and the operational base for the field work as well as the institution where the seminar will take place is the The LANCHART Centre at the University of Copenhagen.

The field work and seminar take place from Monday to Friday in week 13, 2011 (March 28th - April 1st).

Deadline for registration is November 1st 2010. For more information about the field work and how to register see: http://lanchart.hum.ku.dk/news/copenhagen_field_work/.

Conference: Comparative Germanic Syntax and the Icelandic Challenge

  
Comparative Germanic Syntax and the Challenge from Icelandic

A workshop at the 33rd Meeting of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS)
February 23-25, 2011 - University of Göttingen

Organizers:
Thórhallur Eythórsson
Hans-Martin Gärtner

Invited Speakers:
Ásgrímur Angantýsson (Reykjavík)
Nicole Dehé (Konstanz)

Research on comparative Germanic syntax has for a long time been
stimulated by the challenge of Icelandic, a language singled out by a
great number of 'peculiar' phenomena not attested (to such a degree)
elsewhere (Maling & Zaenen 1990; Thráinsson 1994; 2007). The aim of
our workshop is to bring together researchers more narrowly concerned
with the proper analysis of Icelandic with researchers interested in
comparative Germanic syntax who would like to test and broaden their
views in light of the 'Icelandic challenge.' We particularly welcome
attempts at bringing in evidence from the interfaces of syntax with
morphophonology and prosody as well as semantics/pragmatics. Given the
long and virtually uninterrupted literary documentation of Icelandic,
this language is an ideal testing ground for theories of language
change. Therefore, we also encourage contributions from historical
linguistics.

Date: 24-Feb-2011 - 25-Feb-2011

Location: University of Göttingen, Germany

Contact Person: Hans-Martin Gärtner

Meeting Email: gaertner@zas.gwz-berlin.de

Linguistic Fields: Historical Linguistics; Phonology; Semantics; Syntax

Language Family: Germanic

Call for Papers

Call Deadline: 01-Sep-2010

Topics to be addressed at the workshop include (but are not limited to):
I) Grammatical function to Case linking, the status of 'quirky'
patterns (DAT-NOM, ACC-ACC) and its impact on agreement, diatheses,
infinitival structures, and subject reflexives.
II) Transitive expletive constructions (TECs), object-shift, and their
relation to clause structural issues such as adverb placement, verb
positioning, interpretational issues such as definiteness, scope of
negation and negative quantifiers, as well as prosodic issues such as
phrasing.
III) Grammatical vs. interpretational constraints on long- and
medium-distance reflexives such as grammatical function of antecedents
and logophoricity.
IV) Clause combining and the status of markers such as (dependent) V2
and verbal mood.
V) 'Stylistic fronting' and the interplay of central and peripheral
components of the grammar.
VI) Hitherto lesser studied items such as absence of Icelandic
VP-topicalization and lack of indefinite articles, the structure and
interpretation of DP, as well as expression of tense and aspect.

References:
Maling, J. & A. Zaenen (eds.). 1990. Modern Icelandic Syntax. New
York: Academic Press.
Thráinsson, H. 1994. 'Icelandic.' Pp. 142-189 in The Germanic
Languages, ed. by E. König & J. van der Auwera. London: Routledge.
Thráinsson, H. 2007. The Syntax of Icelandic. Cambridge: CUP.

Abstract Submissions:
Abstracts are invited for 30-minute talks (20 minute presentations
plus 10 minutes for discussion). Abstracts should be confined to one
page (including examples and references) with 1-inch margins and
12-point font.

All abstracts should be sent in pdf-format by e-mail (header:
abstract; body: title, author(s) name(s), author(s) addresse(s) to:
gaertner@zas.gwz-berlin.de

Important Dates:
Submission Deadline: September 1, 2010
Notification: September 13, 2010
DGfS Meeting: February 23-25 2011

Also you can take a look at the conference by visiting
http://linguistlist.org/issues/21/21-2771.html

NJL – Special Issue on the Nordic Languages and Linguistic Typology

Here's an interesting call for papers:

Nordic Journal of Linguistics Special Issue on the Nordic Languages and Linguistic Typology
Guest editors: Pål Kristian Eriksen & Camilla Wide

All modern linguistic science – all theoretical frameworks and approaches – at one point or another becomes linguistic typology. Sooner or later they ask the fundamental typological questions: What are the universal features of human language? How do we explain their universality? And how do we explain those features of human language which are NOT universal, but which vary from language to language? How do variation and universality relate to each other? The methodology of linguistic typology – to approach these questions by mapping and comparing language data globally – is not necessarily shared by all linguists, but the basic questions remain the same.

With this as our motto, we want to invite linguists from all fields and frameworks to discuss typological topics of linguistic variation and language universals in a special issue of NJL, to be published in November 2011. Although papers on typology in general are also welcome, we are especially interested in contributions dealing with the Nordic languages from a typological point of view. By ‘Nordic languages’, we mean not only the Scandinavian languages but also the other languages of the Nordic countries. All the Nordic languages occasionally share typological features through Sprachbund effects, and can thus be said to count as members of the same language area.

The Nordic languages are typologically interesting from several perspectives: Macro-typologically, a number of areal features worthy of notice are found here, e.g. V2-based sentential syntax (Scandinavian), expletive subjects (Finnish and Scandinavian), complex expressions of definiteness in noun phrases (Scandinavian), and the multiple number of close vowels (Scandinavian and Southern Sami).

Micro-typologically, the variation in dialects and varieties within the Nordic area is remarkable. Most of the features mentioned in the previous paragraph, and many others, vary significantly across the region. This makes the Nordic languages a gold mine for the dialectologist, and a dialectologist is a typologist, differing from the latter mainly by being dedicated to a geographically or genetically restricted set of languages.

In terms of contact linguistics and areal linguistics, the Nordic languages are also highly interesting typologically. In some respects, they constitute their own language area, characterized by a set of special features. In other respects, the Nordic languages are placed on or close to the dividing line between larger language areas, namely a Eurasian/Siberian area to the East, and a ‘Standard European’ area to the West and South, a position which is likely to have had effects on the local languages.

We therefore encourage authors to submit papers dealing with any such perspective on the meeting point between linguistic typology and the study of Nordic languages, although, as stated above, papers dealing with more general typological issues are also welcome. The deadline is January 31, 2011. Papers should be sent to one of the two guest editors:

Pål Kristian Eriksen
Scandinavian Studies and Comparative Literature
NTNU
NO-7491 Trondheim
Norway
pal.k.eriksen@ntnu.no

Camilla Wide
Scandinavian Languages
University of Turku
FI-20014 University of Turku
Finland
camilla.wide@utu.fi