4th World Congress of African Linguistics

国家科学基金会将支助定于2003年6月17日至23日在新玩法罗格斯大学举行的第四届非洲语言学世界大会。这次会议旨在使非洲的学者与北美、欧洲和其他地区研究非洲语言的学者进行直接的知识接触。为了实现这一目标，会议将赞助大约20名来自非洲的与会者，否则他们在财政上无法前来。其中一些人将成为可以作为榜样的资深人物;其他人将是由匿名摘要选择的有前途的初级研究人员，他们的尖端工作。会议组织者预计总共有300名与会者和近150场演讲。这些将涵盖语言学的各个方面，并提供来自所有主要非洲语言群体的数据。会议还将包括旨在鼓励研究和记录非洲许多濒危语言的专题讨论会，以及解决非洲语言研究中出现的主要分析问题的讲习班。这将是非洲语言学世界大会第一次来到北美。会议记录将由哥本哈根的Rudiger Kopp Verlag出版社出版，永久记录会议结果。今天世界上使用的语言中约有三分之一是非洲语言（估计到2035年），非洲语言对语言学理论的发展产生了很大影响。 但这些语言中只有不到1%被彻底记录下来。困难在于，这些语言中的大多数只能由身在非洲的人来充分研究，而这些学者往往与理论和分析创新的中心隔绝。这次会议将通过在非洲人和非非洲人之间建立联系来改善这种情况，从而导致富有成效的长期合作，使两个社区受益。它还将为北美带来研究非洲语言的兴奋之情，鼓励更多的学者从事这一重要领域。

The National Science Foundation will support the Fourth World Congress in African Linguistics, to be held at Rutgers University in New Brunswick on June 17-23, 2003. This meeting aims to bring scholars based in Africa in direct intellectual contact with scholars doing research on African languages in North America, Europe, and other regions. To accomplish this, the conference will sponsor about 20 participants from Africa who would otherwise find it financially impossible to come. Some of these will be established senior figures who can serve as role models; others will be promising junior researchers chosen by anonymous abstracts for their cutting-edge work. In all, meeting organizers expect about 300 participants and close to 150 presentations. These will cover every facet of linguistics and present data from all the major groups of African languages. The meeting will also include symposia designed to encourage research and documentation of the many endangered languages of Africa, and workshops that address major analytical problems that arise in the study of African languages. This will be the first time that the World Congress of African Linguistics has come to North America. The proceedings of the Congress will be published by Rudiger Kopp Verlag of Koln, giving a permanent record of the results.Approximately one third of the languages spoken in the world today are African languages (an estimated 2035), and African languages have had a large impact on the development of linguistic theory. But less than 1% of these languages have been thoroughly documented. The difficulty is that most of these languages can only be studied adequately by people who are physically present in Africa, and these scholars tend to become isolated from the centers of theoretical and analytical innovation. This meeting will be a step toward improving this situation by creating contacts between Africans and non-Africans that can lead to productive long term collaborations that fertilize both communities. It will also bring a taste of the excitement of working on African languages to North America, encouraging more scholars to take up this important area.