Conference: Georgetown University Round Table 2017 on variable properties

来自美国国家科学基金会的资金将支持2017年3月10日至12日在乔治敦大学举行的2017年乔治敦大学语言和语言学圆桌会议（GURT）。该会议自1949年以来每年举行一次，涵盖了每年不同的广泛重要主题。GURT 2017将专注于语言中的变量属性，特别是它们是如何获得的。会议将讨论幼儿或成人如何获得各种可变属性，以及语法属性如何在几代人之间发生变化。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，从不同子领域的角度研究语言，并使用一系列方法。会议的目的是朝着生物学上连贯的解释全方位的变化，弥合筒仓，使社会语言学家从句法变化的学生互动，并保持历史语言学家从语音学家工作的变化。因此，GURT 2017的主要目标是改变对话，并为经验丰富的学者提供指导年轻学者的机会，包括研究生和博士后研究员，他们正在研究变异，鼓励他们跨领域工作。语言所体现的变异在生物学上是不寻常的;它在其他物种或人类认知的其他方面都没有发现。例如，纳瓦霍人的语法结构与说纽荷兰语的人不同。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;仍然被认为是相同的单词发音的变异;发生在特定言语社区或特定言语风格中的变异;以及受与特定对话者的互动和适应影响的产出变异。所有的语言变异都提出了一个问题，即儿童和成人如何发现和适应这些特性。既然所有的变异都是由变化引起的，学者们就需要说明可变的性质是如何首先出现的，是如何首先获得的。

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.