GSFL2010

Language change has been a central research area in linguistics for at least 200 years. In retrospect, the field has seen questions being asked and answered, but still many questions have not received a satisfactory answer, and others are barely being asked. Also, new theoretical approaches are leading to fresh questions being posed, a situation that in turn results in constantly shifting research frontiers. Moreover, novel research topics are being brought to the fore as a consequence of processes of globalisation. In our time, the contact between people across borders and between different societies is constantly getting broader and deeper, and at the same time, the challenges posed by migration and integration are becoming more pressing. Language is a crucial ingredient in these challenges. Thus, problems of language contact and change, language interaction and mixture, language development and acquisition, and language birth and language death, are urgently in need of illumination.

Given this background, the aim of our conference Language Contact and Change – Grammatical Structure Encounters the Fluidity of Language is to bring together researchers from different camps in linguistics in order to elucidate theoretical questions as well as the seeming vagaries of a broad range of phenomena of language contact and change. In particular, we wish to bring together grammarians and sociolinguists, i.e. linguists doing research on the structure and system of language and linguist doing research on the use and function of language, in order to try to bring new perspectives into the field. By bringing together researchers from different theoretical and methodological camps in this way, we wish to contribute to meaningful scientific interaction between researchers with different perspectives, thus facilitating fruitful dialogue and cross-fertilisation that may lead to fresh insights and scientific advances. We sincerely believe that a satisfactory understanding of the dynamic and often extremely complex processes of language contact and language change requires a joint effort by both grammarians and sociolinguists.

The following linguists have already agreed to attend the conference as invited speakers:

• Enoch Aboh, University of Amsterdam
• Peter Auer, University of Freiburg
• Derek Bickerton, University of Hawaii
• Leonie Cornips, Meertens Institute
• Michel DeGraff, MIT
• Frans Gregersen, University of Copenhagen
• Salikoko Mufwene, University of Chicago
• Frederick J. Newmeyer, University of Washington
• Rajendra Singh, Université de Montréal