Conference: Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages 50: Austin, TX: April 2020

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

The 50th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL) will be held at the University of Texas at Austin from April 23-25, 2020. The LSRL attracts an international body of scholars, and is a prominent venue for scholarly discussion and dissemination of research findings in the subfields of syntax, semantics, pragmatics, phonology, phonetics, historical linguistics/dialectology, and second language, heritage and bilingual studies as they apply to the Romance languages. LSRL50 will showcase research that employs diverse methods and different types of empirical observations applied to various Romance languages in the evaluation, testing, and revision of linguistic models. The objectives of the conference include promoting a culture of open and shared tools and data, bridging linguistics with STEM disciplines, providing a forum in which scholars of different orientations communicate with one another, and actively involving graduate and undergraduate students from languages and linguistics and from STEM fields in conference activities. The conference consists of 54 refereed oral presentations and 30 selected poster presentations. Five keynote speakers will address multiple sub-disciplines and languages using diverse methods of data collection: fieldwork, laboratory studies, sociolinguistic interviews, archival recordings, and web scraping. In addition, there will be a 'bring your own data' workshop to help participants visualize and explore multilingual language data. Funding from the National Science Foundation will provide partial support for the keynote speakers and the data science workshop convener. Funding will also provide student participation support costs for up to 20 undergraduate students, many of whom come from academic units that serve students of bilingualism and multiculturalism, an interest that reflects the social makeup of Texas and of the U.S. more generally. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.