Conference: Variation at the Crossroads - Toronto, Ontario, Canada; October 23-25, 2015

West Virginia University Research Corporation, Morgantown WV

Investigators

Abstract

Modern science has become highly specialized, even within the study of everyday spoken language. This trend has fostered wonderful discoveries and a better understanding of our world, but it has a down side. If specialists do not work with other kinds of specialists, new realms of knowledge cannot be crafted. This problem is addressed within linguistics by bringing together experts from several complementary fields in order to identify promising and important research directions for the next decade. This event is organized by an international panel of scholars and pulls together experts from around the world. They will explore five important areas of language study. First, some scholars will examine how babies acquire language with so much sound variation around them. Second, some scholars will explore the two qualities that uniquely define human language, variation and syntax. Third, scholars will develop ways that new computational powers can be best used in linguistics. The fourth and fifth areas are documentation of lesser-studied languages and the effects of language contact, two domains of increasing importance to Americans as English increases its global reach. The workshop will showcase current sociolinguistic models of language variation intersecting with endangered language documentation, formal theory, acquisition, language contact, creole studies, and big data, with the aim of fostering cross-disciplinarily. The workshop will take place during the conference New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 44, which we expect to attract ~400 participants. NWAV is recognized worldwide as the major forum devoted to research in the Variationist Sociolinguistic framework. The workshop will work in concert with the conference, with four cornerpost special sessions and a plenary lecture. Each cornerpost session will be a collaborative event with participants whose abstracts are vetted by the cornerpost leader and workshop committee. The purpose of each cornerpost session is to design the goals of their subfield of linguistics for the next decade. The plenary speaker is a captivating speaker with infectious enthusiasm and zeal for her work. She was trained by a founders of the discipline and will describe her research which cuts across Variationist Sociolinguistics (the central focus of the host conference), bilingualism, endangered language documentation, creole studies and language contact. In contrast, the other invited speakers are all are high-profile researchers and innovators who come from outside Variationist Sociolinguistics. Collectively, the invited presentations will deepen and broaden the questions that will occupy Variationist Sociolinguists in the next decade and set the agenda for future research.