U.S.-Iceland Linguistics Workshop on Change and Variation in Icelandic Syntax

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This U.S.-Iceland linguistics workshop links senior researchers and graduate students from four U.S. universities with counterparts from the University of Iceland and the University of Edinburgh. The co-organizers are Prof. Anthony Kroch of the University of Pennsylvania and Prof. Sigridur Sigurjonsdottir, from the Institute of Linguistics, in Reykjavik. Together, workshop participants with complementary strengths in corpus linguistics, historical syntax, language acquisition and sociolinguistics will define an agenda for future study of the origins, diffusion and grammar of syntactic changes in Icelandic. Their goal is to gain new insights into the relationship between language change and language acquisition. Iceland's isolation and tradition of studying their native language present researchers with a nearly unique opportunity to look at cross-linguistic grammatical variation in a member of the North Germanic language family. Since English also belongs to this language family, there is considerable overlap in interests related to methodological and conceptual issues. Reflecting this, workshop plans involve: 1) design of experiments and observational techniques for child language acquisition with attention to acquisition that gives rise to linguistic innovation and 2) refinement of data elicitation protocols and a syntactic markup scheme that will be compatible with computerized concordances and corpora developed in Iceland. Results from new, follow-on cooperative research are expected to improve our grasp of the nature of normal language acquisition and, in the long run, may have implications for improving the evaluation of language development problems in young children. The international linguistics workshop fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the United States and Europe to combine complementary talents and share research resources in areas of strong mutual interest and competence. Broader impacts include early career introduction of five U.S. graduate students to leading linguists in the international community and an introduction to cyber-enabled tools for use in construction of databases for linguistic and computational research.