Diachronic Generative Syntax Conference - DIGS VIII

Yale University, New Haven CT

Investigators

Abstract

The National Science Foundation will support the eighth Diachronic Syntax Conference, to be hosted by the Department of Linguistics at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, from June 24th to June 27th, 2004. The conference will provide a forum for discussion of issues related to syntactic variation and change. The conference will bring together two groups of researchers: those who work on syntactic variation, including dialect variation, and those whose research focuses on syntactic variation from the perspective of generative syntactic theory. The conference will focus on these issues from a comparative perspective and promote discussion of research on a variety of languages including non-Indo-European languages and non-standard varieties. The main goal of the conference is to provide a forum to address the nature of the relationship between syntactic variation as exhibited in the speech community and syntactic change. Studies of variation and the use of non-standard varieties of language can provide important information for educators regarding the classroom usage of non-standard varieties of language by their students. In addition, the findings of the conference will be relevant to research in fields related to linguistics such as anthropology and sociology. The issues of language variation, language contact and language change that will be discussed at this meeting are also important for furthering our understanding of the means by which languages or non-standard varieties of languages may become endangered.