4th World Congress of African Linguistics

美国国家科学基金会将支持将于2003年6月17日至23日在新不伦瑞克的罗格斯大学举行的第四届世界非洲语言学大会。这次会议的目的是让非洲学者与北美、欧洲和其他地区从事非洲语言研究的学者进行直接的智力接触。为了实现这一目标，大会将赞助大约20名来自非洲的与会者，否则他们将发现经济上不可能参加会议。其中一些将是可以作为榜样的知名高级人物；另一些将是由匿名摘要为其尖端工作挑选的有前途的初级研究人员。总体而言，会议组织者预计约有300人参加，近150场演讲。这些资料将涵盖语言学的方方面面，并提供所有主要非洲语种的数据。会议还将包括旨在鼓励对非洲许多濒危语言进行研究和记录的研讨会，以及解决非洲语言研究中出现的主要分析问题的讲习班。这将是世界非洲语言学大会首次来到北美。大会议事录将由科隆的Rudiger Kopp Verlag出版，永久记录结果。今天世界上大约三分之一的语言是非洲语言(估计2035年)，非洲语言对语言学理论的发展产生了很大影响。但在这些语言中，只有不到1%得到了全面的记录。困难在于，这些语言中的大多数只能由身处非洲的人充分学习，而这些学者往往与理论和分析创新的中心隔绝。这次会议将是改善这种情况的一步，在非洲人和非非洲人之间建立联系，可以导致富有成效的长期合作，使两个社区都肥沃起来。它还将把研究非洲语言的兴奋带到北美，鼓励更多的学者研究这一重要领域。

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.