Conference: Georgetown University Round Table 2017 on variable properties

美国国家科学基金会将为2017年3月10日至12日在乔治城大学举行的年度乔治城大学语言和语言学圆桌会议提供资金支持。自1949年以来，该会议每年举行一次，涉及的重要议题范围广泛，每年都有所不同。GURT 2017将重点关注语言中的可变属性，特别是如何获得这些属性。会议将讨论儿童或成人如何获得所有可变属性，以及语法属性如何在几代说话者之间发生变化。GURT 2017的主要目标是促进研究人员之间的互动和潜在的合作，从不同的子领域的角度研究语言，并使用一系列的方法。这次会议的目的是取得进展，从生物学上连贯地描述所有的变化，弥合阻碍社会语言学家与句法变化学生互动的隔阂，并使历史语言学家与语音学家分开研究变化。因此，GURT 2017的一个主要目标是改变对话，并为有经验的学者提供指导年轻学者的机会，包括正在研究变异的研究生和博士后，鼓励他们跨领域工作。语言体现的这种变异在生物学上是不寻常的；它在其他物种和人类认知的其他方面都没有发现。例如，说纳瓦霍语的人与说纽普语的人有不同的语法结构。会议将讨论特定语言或语言群的语音和句法特点。语言变异包括产生结构对比的变异；发音上的变化，但仍然被认为是相同的；变异：发生在特定语言群体或特定语言风格中的变异；生产的变化受与特定对话者的互动和适应的影响。所有的语言变异都提出了这样的问题：这些特性是如何被幼儿和成人发现和适应的？由于所有的变异都源于变化，学者们需要解释可变属性是如何首先产生的，如何首先获得的。

Funding from the National Science Foundation will support the 2017 annual Georgetown University Round Table (GURT) on Languages and Linguistics, to be held March 10-12, 2017, at Georgetown University. This conference has been held every year since 1949, covering a wide range of important topics differing from year to year. GURT 2017 will focus on variable properties in language, and in particular, on how they are acquired. The meeting will consider how the full range of variable properties is acquired by young children or adults, and how grammatical properties may change across generations of speakers. A primary goal of GURT 2017 is to foster interaction and potential collaboration among researchers investigating language from the perspectives of different subfields and using a range of methodologies. The conference aims to make progress toward a biologically coherent account of the full range of variation, bridging the silos that keep sociolinguists from interacting with students of syntactic variation, and keep historical linguists apart from phoneticians working on variability. A primary goal of GURT 2017 is thus to change the dialog and to provide opportunities for experienced scholars to mentor young scholars, including graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, who are working on variation, encouraging them to work across domains. The kind of variation that language embodies is biologically unusual; it is not found in other species nor in other aspects of human cognition. Navajo speakers, for example, have grammatical structures different from those of Nupe speakers. The conference will address the phonological and syntactic peculiarities specific to particular languages or groups of languages. Linguistic variation includes the variation that yields structural contrasts; variations in the pronunciation of words that are still recognized to be the same; variation that occurs in particular speech communities or in particular styles of speech; and variation in production influenced by interaction with and accommodation to particular interlocutors. All linguistic variation raises questions about how such properties can be discovered and accommodated by young children and by adults. And since all variation results from change, scholars need an account of how variable properties might have first arisen, were first acquired.