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

美国-冰岛语言学研讨会将四所美国大学的高级研究人员和研究生与冰岛大学和爱丁堡大学的同行联系起来。联合组织者是宾夕法尼亚大学的Anthony Kroch教授和雷克雅未克语言学研究所的Sigridur Sigurjonsdottir教授。在语料库语言学、历史句法、语言习得和社会语言学方面具有互补优势的讲习班参与者将共同确定未来研究冰岛语句法变化的起源、传播和语法的议程。他们的目标是对语言变化和语言习得之间的关系获得新的见解。冰岛的孤立和学习母语的传统为研究人员提供了一个几乎独一无二的机会来研究北日耳曼语系成员的跨语言语法变化。由于英语也属于这个语系，所以在方法论和概念问题上有相当大的重叠。为了反映这一点，研讨会计划包括：1)设计儿童语言习得的实验和观察技术，关注引起语言创新的习得；2)改进数据提取协议和语法标记方案，使其与冰岛开发的计算机检索和语料库兼容。新的后续合作研究的结果有望提高我们对正常语言习得本质的掌握，从长远来看，可能会对改善幼儿语言发展问题的评估产生影响。国际语言学研讨会实现了促进科学知识的计划目标，使美国和欧洲的专家能够在共同感兴趣和能力强的领域结合互补的人才和共享研究资源。更广泛的影响包括将五名美国研究生的早期职业生涯介绍给国际社会的主要语言学家，并介绍了用于构建语言和计算研究数据库的网络工具。

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.