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Variation in Language
Start date:
04.10.2004
End date:
08.10.2004
Venue:
University of Tromsø
Variation in Language is a national Research Training Seminar co-hosted by CASTL and the Department of Linguistics with the generous support from NFU-H. This one-week intensive course is intended for doctoral students, but is open to interested parties at all levels. There is no fee.
The teachers for this course will be Professor David Adger (Queen Mary, London) and Professor Marc van Oostendorp (Meertens Institute, Amsterdam). They will each be teaching 2-3 hours, Monday-Thursday, October 4-7.
Professor Adger's course will look at syntactic variation, specifically focussing on variation within a speech community and within an individual. We will see how sociolinguists have tried to deal with such variation, and why generative syntacticians have often stayed away from it. We will look at whether this kind of variation should be modelled within a grammar, and if so, how. Much of the data will be from varieties of English, but we will also draw upon variation in other languages.
Handout 1; Handout 2; Handout 3
Professor van Oostendorp's course starts with the observation that variation seems to be an inherent property of any human language: no community is completely homogenous, and even every individual human being seems to master more than one style of speech. This course addresses the topic of language variation in phonology, mainly from the perspective of Optimality Theory. We distinguish between three types of variation: intraspeaker variation (style levels, multilingualism), interspeaker variation (social variation correlated to age, social class, etc.) and 'free' variation. We discuss how each of these types of variation can be modelled, drawing facts from varieties of German, Italian, Finnish, Greek and other (mainly European) languages. We also address the question of how theoretical phonology relates to neighbouring disciplines, such as dialectology and sociolinguistics.
Handout
On Friday, we will be hosting a Workshop on Variation, with invited speakers Jen Smith (York) and Øystein Vangsnes (Tromsø). We invite participants in the course and others to indicate an interest in presenting at this workshop when registering for the course (see the Registration page in the right hand menu).
Participants in the course are invited to a banquet Friday evening.
Course credit is available for participants. Please see the "For Ph.D.s" section in the right hand menu.
No travel support is available.
To register for the course, please go to the registration page.
Schedules and practical information will be made available on this site shortly. In order to receive updates by email, please enter your email address in the field below and click the button.
If you have any questions about the course, please contact the organizers at castl@hum.uit.no.
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