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

这个美国-冰岛语言学研讨会将来自美国四所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在一起。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优势互补的研讨会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有新的认识。冰岛的与世隔绝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差异。由于英语也属于这一语言家族，在方法和概念问题上有相当大的兴趣重叠。考虑到这一点，讲习班计划涉及：1)设计儿童语言习得的实验和观察技术，注重引起语言创新的习得；2)完善数据获取协议和句法标记方案，使之与冰岛开发的计算机化的语料库和语料库相兼容。来自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把握，并从长远来看，可能对改善对幼儿语言发展问题的评估具有启示意义。国际语言学研讨会通过使美国和欧洲的专家能够结合互补的人才并在共同感兴趣和能力很强的领域共享研究资源来实现促进科学知识的计划目标。更广泛的影响包括将五名美国研究生早期职业介绍给国际社会的领先语言学家，以及介绍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.