28.647, Calls: Historical Ling, Ling Theories, Syntax/South Africa

Thu Feb 2 20:56:14 UTC 2017

LINGUIST List: Vol-28-647. Thu Feb 02 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.647, Calls: Historical Ling, Ling Theories, Syntax/South Africa

Moderators: linguist at linguistlist.org (Damir Cavar, Malgorzata E. Cavar)
Reviews: reviews at linguistlist.org (Helen Aristar-Dry, Robert Coté,
                                   Michael Czerniakowski)
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Editor for this issue: Kenneth Steimel <ken at linguistlist.org>
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Date: Thu, 02 Feb 2017 15:56:05
From: Theresa Biberauer [samtb23 at gmail.com]
Subject: Historical Ling, Ling Theories, Syntax/South Africa

Full Title: 19th Diachronic Generative Syntax Conference 
Short Title: DiGS 19 

Date: 05-Sep-2017 - 08-Sep-2017
Location: Stellenbosch, Cape Province, South Africa 
Contact Person: Theresa Biberauer
Meeting Email: samtb23 at gmail.com
Web Site: http://www.sun.ac.za/english/faculty/arts/linguistics/digs-19 

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Linguistic Theories; Syntax 

Call Deadline: 17-Feb-2017 

Meeting Description:

DiGS is an established international conference, first launched in 1990, which
has, until now, alternated between venues in Europe and the Americas (see
http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/george.walkden/digs/ for an
overview of DiGS's history). Taking place annually since 2008, with 2009
having produced the first foray beyond Europe and North America (to Brazil),
the conference is now widely recognised as a privileged forum for the
presentation of research on formal diachronic syntax, combining historical and
more broadly comparative investigations of syntactic phenomena from a
generative perspective. 

In 2016, DiGS will be making (more) history: for the first time in the
conference's now more than a quarter century-long history, it will take place
in Africa! South Africa's Stellenbosch University and the University of the
Western Cape are proud to announce the 19th Diachronic Generative Syntax
Conference (DiGS 19), which will take place in the fairest Cape 5-8 September
2017.

As has become traditional, the main conference will be preceded by a themed
workshop. The theme of this workshop will be 'Language Variation and Change in
Contact Situations'. Abstracts may be submitted to both the main conference
and the workshop.

DiGS 19 welcomes submissions on any topic in formal diachronic syntax, but
especially encourages research that reports novel linguistic data and/or sheds
light on the internal and external sources of language change and the courses
that this change can and can't take. As always, our aim is, on the one hand,
to harness diachrony to probe the properties of natural language, and, on the
other, to contribute to our understanding of how those properties constrain
language change.

Invited Speakers:

Enoch Aboh (Amsterdam)
Charlotte Galves (Campinas)
David Lightfoot (Georgetown)
Pieter Muysken (Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen/Stellenbosch) 
Jenneke van der Wal (Harvard)

2nd Call for Papers:

We invite abstracts for 30-minute talks (followed by 10 minutes of discussion)
on any aspect of diachronic generative syntax. Given the location of the
conference, we would particularly this year like to encourage research
focusing on:

- Variation and both change and stability in Africa and other contact
situations
- Variation and change in more extreme ''poverty of the stimulus'' situations
(e.g. creolisation, home-sign and sign-language contexts)
- Language attrition
- The impact of multilingualism - also including multilectalism - on language
structure over time, including the ways in which having knowledge of both
formal (and potentially prescriptively imposed) and informal (and potentially
exclusively spoken) varieties may produce change

Workshop:

Language Variation and Change in Contact Situations

In addition to the main conference (which will also include a poster session),
there will be a workshop focusing on the theme of variation and change in
contact situations. This workshop will take place on 5 September, and we
welcome papers focusing on any (synchronic or diachronic) contact-related
topic. The workshop is intended as a venue both for primarily empirical and
for more theoretically oriented papers. Topics of interest thus include, but
are not limited to:

- Descriptions of un(der)studied contact varieties and of (apparently)
contact-induced structures
- Linguistic situations where acquirers/speakers can be shown to have ''gone
beyond the input''
- The aspects of syntax and language structure more generally that seem to be
either particularly contact-sensitive or particularly contact-resistant (i.e.
stable)
- Formally motivated discussion of what 'convergence' in language-contact
situations means, and of the extent to which simplification plays a prominent
role here
- The role of L2 acquisition, code-switching, and other
multilingualism-related phenomena in the shaping of contact varieties
- The types of optionality observed in contact situations. Here we are, among
other things, particularly interested both in contact scenarios where a
prescriptively imposed standard is and where one isn't in the picture.
- Attrition
- Contact modelling

Papers will be 20- or 30-minutes long (with 10 minutes for discussion in each
case). Please indicate on your abstract (in the header) if you have a
preference for a 20- or 30-minute talk.

Abstract Guidelines:

Abstracts for both the workshop and the DiGS main conference should not exceed
two pages, with 2.5cm margins on all sides and a font size of 12pt. This
includes data, references and diagrams.

Each author may submit no more than one single-authored and one co-authored
abstract, or two co-authored ones. The workshop and the main conference
''count'' as one event in relation to this constraint, i.e. no more than 2
abstracts in total by a single author.

Abstracts must be anonymous and prospective presenters should submit their
abstract in pdf to:

http://linguistlist.org/easyabs/digs19

If you wish your abstract to be considered specifically either for the
workshop or for the main conference, please indicate this in the header of
your abstract, and register the choice on EasyAbs when you submit. Abstracts
lacking a specific Header indication will automatically be considered for
both.

The deadline for submission is Friday 17 February 2017.
Notification of acceptance by Monday 20 March 2017.

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