Language Variation and Change

Announcements:

Please contact Alice Lemieux (lemieux@uchicago.edu) to be added to the mailing list.

Overview:

The Language Variation and Change Workshop provides an interdisciplinary forum for graduate students and faculty to discuss the motivations and consequences of language change from diverse perspectives (incl. linguistic, historical, social, cognitive, and computational).

Summary:

The fact that languages change and evolve has always captured the imaginations of not only linguists, but also philosophers, historians, anthropologists, economists, politicians, and your everyday laypersons. Language change presupposes variation, where the same linguistic expression has multiple realizations (e.g., the -ing suffix in English is variably pronounced as either -ing or -in for many speakers of American English). Yet, much is still unknown about how variation leads to change. In particular, what are the pathways of language change? How does a given language embed in the surrounding system of linguistic and social relations and how do members of a speech community evaluate a given change? Why did a given linguistic change occur at the particular place and time? And, finally, what general constraints determine possible and impossible changes and their directionality?

Schedule:

Next Talk

Monday, December 7th, 2009, 3:30 PM, Location TBA
Kelly Maynard
Topic: TBA

Upcomings Talks

January 15th, 2010	Craig Melchert, UCLA	Topic: TBA
February 12th, 2010	Malcolm Elliott, University of Chicago	Topic: TBA
February 26th, 2010	Jay Jasanoff, Harvard University	Topic: TBA
May 14th, 2010	James Stanford, Dartmouth University	Topic: TBA

Contacts:

Professor Alan Yu	aclyu@uchicago.edu
Professor Yaroslav Gorbachov	gorbachov@uchicago.edu
Alice Lemieux, student coordinator	lemieux@uchicago.edu
Julia Thomas, student coordinator (Autumn 2009)	jmthomas@uchicago.edu