Language in Space: Geographic Perspectives on Language Diversity and Diachrony

这笔拨款将支持一个小型会议，“空间中的语言：语言多样性和历时性的地理视角”，该会议将于2011年7月在科罗拉多州博尔德的语言研究所举行。会议将汇集不同领域的科学家——专门研究语言多样性、史前史和人文地理的学者——目的是在一个新兴的跨学科领域进行协同研究。从智力上讲，这是及时的，有几个原因，特别是因为语言学家越来越关注全球类型模式的定量分析，语言学家和进化生物学家对人口流动和语言多样化的计算建模的参与，以及新的地理工具和分析方法在语言研究中的广泛适用性。这次会议将有助于了解人们及其语言如何在小范围和大范围的地理空间中传播。会议将充分利用其场地，2011语言学研究所。这是一个两年一次为期一个月的暑期学校，来自美国和世界各地的大约400-500名语言学家参加，其中大多数是学生。在一个为期两天、演讲者不到24人的会议上，没有任何其他场合能找到如此多的听众，尤其是语言学专业的本科生和研究生。参加该研究所的学生将发现这次会议作为他们语言学教育的一部分很有价值，让他们接触到他们可能不会遇到的想法和方法，并让他们结识在一系列相关领域有影响力的科学家。

This grant will support a small conference, "Language in Space: Geographic Perspectives on Language Diversity and Diachrony", to be held in July, 2011, at the Linguistic Institute in Boulder, Colorado. The conference will bring together scientists in disparate fields - scholars specializing in language diversity, prehistory, and human geography - with the goal of synergizing research in an emerging interdisciplinary field. Intellectually this is timely for several reasons, notably because of the growing attention paid by linguists to the quantitative analysis of global typological patterns, the engagement by linguists and evolutionary biologists to computational modeling of population movement and language diversification, and the broad applicability of new geographical tools and analytic methods in the study of language. This conference will contribute to understanding how people and their languages spread across small-scale and broad-range geographical spaces.The conference will take full advantage of its venue, the 2011 Linguistic Institute. This is a biennial month-long summer school attended by about 400-500 linguists from the U.S. and around the world, most of them students. There is no other setting where a two-day conference with fewer than two dozen speakers could find such a large audience, especially of undergraduate and graduate students in linguistics. Students attending the Institute will find the meeting valuable as a part of their education in linguistics, giving them exposure to ideas and approaches they might not otherwise encounter and letting them meet influential scientists in a range of allied fields.