Cross-disciplinary Workshop on Information Structure

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

African languages have much to contribute to our understanding of information structure, a fundamental aspect of human language that determines how meaning is conveyed in a conversation. A three-day workshop on information structure will be held in July 2022 at the end of the African Linguistics School (ALS) 6. It will feature a series of talks by faculty and students, tutorials on methods of investigating information structure, and a panel discussion, featuring different languages and sub-disciplines of linguistics. Participants will be invited to contribute papers for publication in an open-access volume. ALS is a two-week institute for graduate students in linguistics, with faculty from the US and other countries teaching the courses and mentoring the students on a voluntary basis. Holding the workshop in conjunction with ALS gives students an opportunity to participate in a research workshop in addition to their courses. Participating American scholars and students will interact with African scholars and students, learning about African languages directly from speaker-linguists, spurring collaborative projects, and training the next generation of scientists to study this important aspect of language that has potential to inform not only linguistic theory but also language education, translation, and cross-cultural understanding. Information structure can involve a word or phrase being emphasized or made prominent. This can be conveyed through word order, focus words, special pronouns, or prosodic changes (e.g., higher pitch, longer duration). African languages use all of these methods in complex and intricate ways, but they have been relatively underrepresented in the scientific literature on information structure, limiting our understanding. Information structure can be investigated through the lens of language processing, social language use, language contact, and in signed languages as well as spoken languages. The workshop will feature all of these methodologies and domains of study, along with many others, in order to broaden our scientific knowledge of information structure. The focus on under-documented African languages will advance our understanding and will highlight the contributions of diverse language communities to scientific investigation. 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.