Conference - announcement and call for papers

[Yoshiko Matsumoto]

Announcing a conference on:

"Diversity and Universals in Language: The Consequences of Variation"

sponsored by the Division of Languages, Cultures and Literatures,
Stanford University.

Pigott Hall
Stanford University
May 21-23, 2004


Theme:

Diversity in language is ubiquitous:  typological studies have
identified many degrees of variation in every system of grammar (e.g.,
lexical category systems, systems of pronominal anaphora,
(non-)configurational structure, degrees of inflection, to mention
just a few), and studies within a given "language" have also
identified many kinds of variation, only some of which are correlated
with social groups, communities, or communicative styles.

We welcome abstracts for papers which address any of these kinds of
variation in the context of consequences for notions of linguistic
universals, of a "standard language", or even what it means to "speak
language X", and for language teaching (e.g., how far can the
grammatical properties of one language be used to elucidate the
properties of another, or, what variety of language X does one teach
as the "standard language"?).

Invited speakers:

Barbara Johnstone, Carnegie Mellon University
Claire Kramsch, University of California, Berkeley
Marianne Mithun,  University of California, Santa Barbara
Toshio Ohori, Tokyo University

Abstract Guidelines:

We are soliciting abstracts for 20-minute talks relevant to any of the
topics mentioned above.  Abstracts should be in 11pt font, or larger,
consisting of one text page with a second page (only) for data,
examples, charts, and references.  Abstracts should be submitted
electronically in Word (.doc) or Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) format to:
div-in-lang-conf at stanford.edu.  The author(s) of the abstract should not
be
identified in the abstract itself; the body of the submission message
should include the title of the abstract, the names(s) of the
author(s), the(ir) affiliation, and e-mail address(es).

*Deadline* for submission: March 8th, 2004.  The conference program
will be announced as early as possible in later March.

We plan to collect as many papers from the conference as possible for
publication with a major publisher on the theme of linguistic
diversity.


Organizing Committee:

Eve V. Clark, Linguistics
Yoshiko Matsumoto, Asian Languages
Alice A. Miano, Language Center
Orrin W. Robinson, German Studies
David Oshima, Linguistics
Peter Sells, Linguistics
Chaofen Sun, Asian Languages

For further information please contact: div-in-lang-conf at stanford.edu.