Conference: Georgetown University Round Table 2017 on variable properties

Georgetown University, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

Funding from the National Science Foundation will support the 2017 annual Georgetown University Round Table (GURT) on Languages and Linguistics, to be held March 10-12, 2017, at Georgetown University. This conference has been held every year since 1949, covering a wide range of important topics differing from year to year. GURT 2017 will focus on variable properties in language, and in particular, on how they are acquired. The meeting will consider how the full range of variable properties is acquired by young children or adults, and how grammatical properties may change across generations of speakers. A primary goal of GURT 2017 is to foster interaction and potential collaboration among researchers investigating language from the perspectives of different subfields and using a range of methodologies. The conference aims to make progress toward a biologically coherent account of the full range of variation, bridging the silos that keep sociolinguists from interacting with students of syntactic variation, and keep historical linguists apart from phoneticians working on variability. A primary goal of GURT 2017 is thus to change the dialog and to provide opportunities for experienced scholars to mentor young scholars, including graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, who are working on variation, encouraging them to work across domains. The kind of variation that language embodies is biologically unusual; it is not found in other species nor in other aspects of human cognition. Navajo speakers, for example, have grammatical structures different from those of Nupe speakers. The conference will address the phonological and syntactic peculiarities specific to particular languages or groups of languages. Linguistic variation includes the variation that yields structural contrasts; variations in the pronunciation of words that are still recognized to be the same; variation that occurs in particular speech communities or in particular styles of speech; and variation in production influenced by interaction with and accommodation to particular interlocutors. All linguistic variation raises questions about how such properties can be discovered and accommodated by young children and by adults. And since all variation results from change, scholars need an account of how variable properties might have first arisen, were first acquired.