Conference: Variation at the Crossroads - Toronto, Ontario, Canada; October 23-25, 2015

现代科学已经变得高度专业化，甚至在日常口语研究中也是如此。这一趋势促进了奇妙的发现和对我们世界的更好理解，但它也有不利的一面。如果专家不与其他类型的专家合作，就不可能创造出新的知识领域。这个问题是在语言学领域内解决的，方法是将几个互补领域的专家聚集在一起，以便确定下一个十年有希望和重要的研究方向。这次活动是由一个国际学者小组组织的，汇集了来自世界各地的专家。他们将探索语言学习的五个重要领域。首先，一些学者将研究婴儿是如何在周围有如此多的声音变化的情况下获得语言的。其次，一些学者将探索独一无二地定义人类语言的两个特征：变异和句法。第三，学者们将开发新的计算能力在语言学中得到最佳利用的方法。第四和第五个领域是较少研究的语言的记录和语言接触的影响，这两个领域对美国人来说越来越重要，因为英语在全球范围内的影响。研讨会将展示当前的语言变异的社会语言学模型，与濒危语言文献、形式理论、习得、语言接触、克里奥尔研究和大数据交叉，目的是促进跨学科发展。研讨会将在分析变化的新方法(NWAV)44会议期间举行，我们预计将吸引约400人参加。NWAV是全世界公认的致力于研究变异主义社会语言学框架的主要论坛。讲习班将与会议协调开展工作，包括四次基石特别会议和一次全体讲座。每一次基石会议都将是一次合作活动，与会者的摘要将由基石负责人和研讨会委员会审查。每一次基石会议的目的都是设计其语言学分支领域下一个十年的目标。全体演讲者是一位令人着迷的演讲者，对她的工作充满了感染力和热情。她接受了该学科创始人的培训，并将介绍她的研究，涉及变异主义社会语言学(主持人会议的中心焦点)、双语、濒危语言文献、克里奥尔语研究和语言接触。相比之下，其他受邀演讲者都是来自Variationist Social语言学之外的知名研究人员和创新者。总体而言，受邀的演讲将深化和拓宽未来十年社会语言学家将面临的问题，并为未来的研究设定议程。

Modern science has become highly specialized, even within the study of everyday spoken language. This trend has fostered wonderful discoveries and a better understanding of our world, but it has a down side. If specialists do not work with other kinds of specialists, new realms of knowledge cannot be crafted. This problem is addressed within linguistics by bringing together experts from several complementary fields in order to identify promising and important research directions for the next decade. This event is organized by an international panel of scholars and pulls together experts from around the world. They will explore five important areas of language study. First, some scholars will examine how babies acquire language with so much sound variation around them. Second, some scholars will explore the two qualities that uniquely define human language, variation and syntax. Third, scholars will develop ways that new computational powers can be best used in linguistics. The fourth and fifth areas are documentation of lesser-studied languages and the effects of language contact, two domains of increasing importance to Americans as English increases its global reach.The workshop will showcase current sociolinguistic models of language variation intersecting with endangered language documentation, formal theory, acquisition, language contact, creole studies, and big data, with the aim of fostering cross-disciplinarily. The workshop will take place during the conference New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 44, which we expect to attract ~400 participants. NWAV is recognized worldwide as the major forum devoted to research in the Variationist Sociolinguistic framework. The workshop will work in concert with the conference, with four cornerpost special sessions and a plenary lecture. Each cornerpost session will be a collaborative event with participants whose abstracts are vetted by the cornerpost leader and workshop committee. The purpose of each cornerpost session is to design the goals of their subfield of linguistics for the next decade. The plenary speaker is a captivating speaker with infectious enthusiasm and zeal for her work. She was trained by a founders of the discipline and will describe her research which cuts across Variationist Sociolinguistics (the central focus of the host conference), bilingualism, endangered language documentation, creole studies and language contact. In contrast, the other invited speakers are all are high-profile researchers and innovators who come from outside Variationist Sociolinguistics. Collectively, the invited presentations will deepen and broaden the questions that will occupy Variationist Sociolinguists in the next decade and set the agenda for future research.