Despite more than 40 years of code-switching (CS) research there is still considerable disagreement on some of the most basic notions on which competing theories depend.  In this talk I will attempt simultaneously to introduce beginners to the field and encourage seasoned CS researchers to questions some of their tacit assumptions. I will do this […]

In the lecture I’ll try to give a panorama of autochthonous languages of Siberia and the Russian Far East touching upon their documentation, current functioning, language contacts in the area and the results of these contacts, language shift in some local groups of autochthonous populations. I’ll trace back the starting points and the development of […]

Variationist sociolinguistic research in Australia has grown rapidly and fruitfully in the last decade. Because of Australia’s unique geographic, historical, cultural and social configuration, Australia-based sociolinguists have uncovered a range of unique perspectives that we will share in this panel. These include how language change has taken place in major multi-ethnic urban centres like Sydney, […]

This talk will offer an overview of a current understanding of the content and the form of linguistic roots. It first reviews the cases i) against semantic content of uncategorised roots and ii) for Late Insertion of roots; then it investigates how native speakers identify roots. First, the idea that roots may be polysemous or may encode the shadow of […]

This roundtable will discuss how different pathologies influence the production and the processing of prosody and phonetics/phonology. It will be given a special attention to different techniques of collecting and analyzing linguistic data. Marc Pell will present a critical review about how Parkinson’s Disease affects the ability to express and interpret meanings by speech prosody. […]

There is a long tradition in the linguistic sciences of considering some phenomena as peripheral to the core of language. These include exceptions to the Saussurean idea of the arbitrariness of the sign such as sound symbolic words, and linguistic expressions that deploy extra-systemic structural features such as interjections, particles, and conversational routines. Moreover, other […]

There have been many recent studies that explain language use and structure from the point of view of communicative efficiency. The linguistic explananda include correlations between frequency (or surprisal) and word length, phonetic reduction of predictable units, minimization of dependency distances in word order, the use and omission of complementizers, relativizers, case markers and other […]

In the space of a decade emoji have gone from being unavailable outside of Japan to active use by over 90% of the world’s online population. Their sudden rise in use is often attributed to the way they allow users to convey in writing what is usually done with tone of voice and body language […]

It has long been an article of faith among linguists (though not among the general public) that all languages are equally complex. Three beliefs have led to this conclusion. First, the idea that languages might differ in complexity seems to go against enlightened humanistic thought: Asserting that one language is ‘simple’ and another ‘complex’ seems […]

27 years have already passed since Chomsky published the paper that inaugurated the so-called Minimalist Program.  It is, thus, time to take stock of our research agenda. This round table presents a critical overview of the developments of the Minimalist approach to language, considering its past achievements and the present challenges it faces. The following […]