 | LAGB 2021: Linguistics Association of Great Britain 2021 Hosted online September 6-9, 2021 |
| Conference website | http://www.lagb.org.uk/lagb2021 |
| Submission link | https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=lagb2021 |
| Submission deadline | May 31, 2021 |
Call for papers
Due to requests from members and the extraordinary circumstances of this year, we are extending our abstract deadline by two weeks to 31 May, 2021.
The LAGB welcomes abstract submissions from all subfields of linguistics, to capture the diversity of linguistics research in the UK and beyond. This year, LAGB 2021 will not only feature our usual general session that will run throughout the conference, but will also include five themed sessions. Abstracts can be submitted to be included in the general sessions or as part of a themed session (see below).
Both members and non-members are invited to offer papers for the meeting, and each individual is permitted to submit up to two abstracts on which they are an author. We are not able to consider any additional submissions from the same author. All abstracts will be blind-peer-reviewed by an international committee of reviewers. The length for all papers delivered at the LAGB 2021 meeting is 20 minutes (plus 10 minutes' discussion).
The deadline for submissions is 5PM GMT Monday, 31 May, 2021.
Formatting guidlines
To ensure that we are able to consider your abstract, please ensure that it adheres to the following guidelines:
- Maximum of two single spaced A4 pages with margins of at least 2.5cm on all sides, with type no smaller than 12 point font in Times New Roman.
- Submitted anonymously, with no indication of the author’s identity.
- Immediately below the title of your abstract, please indicate whether you wish for your abstract to be considered for the general session of one of the special sessions (and if so, which one).
- In PDF format, with any phonetic characters either embedded in the PDF file, or in the Doulos SIL font, which can be downloaded for free from this site: http://scripts.sil.org/DoulosSIL_download.
Themed sessions
LAGB will feature 5 themed sessions, details of which are provided below. When you submit your abstract, please indicate underneath your title whether you are submitting it for consideration for the general session, or for one of the themed sessions.
===========================
New directions in Creole linguistics
The study of Creole languages has been an area of wide ranging and sometimes contentious discussion in the linguistics community. In recent years, a growing community of activists and linguists has worked to raise awareness of issues related to social and political policy around this group of languages, and challenging linguists to critically examine the way that we study Creole languages. At the same time, scholars have been productively combining a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to Creole grammars, such as the work of Felicity Meakins, and Fabiola Henri, to name just two.
This themed session aims to bring together recent work on Creole languages from a variety of perspectives, some of which may include:
- Theoretical and methodological approaches
- Variation and change
- Speakers and the community
- Endangerment and revitalisation
- Education, activism, policy and language rights.
We welcome contributions from scholars and activists engaged with Creole languages both within and outside of an academic context. Contact Robyn Orfitelli (r.orfitelli@sheffield.ac.uk) with any questions.
===========================
Debates in the globalising of variationist sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics explores the relationship between language and society, and variationism, a dominant paradigm thereof, provides an empirical framework for establishing why languages vary, change, and become different from one another in the ways that they do.
Variationism emerged from the intellectual and social challenges of western urban communities of the late 20th century. Today, however, the field’s continued and predominant focus on European languages speaks to a failure in grasping the increasingly global nature of research (Meyerhoff & Stanford 2015). Many non-western communities have linguistic and cultural settings that are starkly different from the communities that form the focus of the field’s scholarship, and, at the same time, research in these communities is under-represented in variationist scholarship, as a number of meta-analyses of the field’s leading venues have now shown (Nagy & Meyerhoff 2008; 2019, Guy & Adli 2019). This is particularly true of scholarship coming from Africa.
This is concerning for a number of reasons. Language endangerment is one of the most pressing issues of our time: by most estimates, between 50-90% of the world’s estimated 7,000 languages will no longer be spoken by the end of the century (Lee & Van Way 2018). Africa’s estimated 2000 languages represent a large proportion of the world’s global linguistic diversity,many of which are under threat. Climate change constitutes a proximal factor in this process,in its contribution to social instability and cultural demise (Lawson & Oak 2014), and African speech communities are disproportionately affected. In spite of these concerns, insights from African language ecologies have been almost entirely overlooked in the development of variationist sociolinguistic theory.
This thematic panel brings together scholars working in and on Africa in order to critically reflect on and contribute to ongoing debates surrounding the applicability of variationist principles and methods to societies and cultures outside of the West. Contact Jonathan Kasstan (J.Kasstan@westminster.ac.uk) with any questions.
===========================
Linguistics and community languages in schools
Over one million UK school children speak another language in addition to English at home (Naldic, 2015). Despite the fact that the vast majority of state (86%) and independent (83%) schools report supporting community languages (Tinsley Report, 2019), a major recent report by the UK national academies nonetheless highlights the minimal impact that these languages have on language learning in mainstream UK schools:
"There is a disconnect between mainstream education and community-based language learning. […] It is scarcely ever connected up with the learning done by the same children in mainstream schools." (The British Academy et al., 2019, 5)
Putting to one side the issue with language qualifications this year, due to the Covid-19 crisis, entries for GCSE and A-level in community languages are slowly rising, unlike mainstream modern foreign language entries (Tinsley, 2017). As the UK addresses its so-called ‘languages crisis’ (Bowler 2020), there is huge potential for community languages to play a more central role in language learning in schools. Linguistics should also play a role in the transformation of languages. In this themed session, we welcome contributions which address the question of how linguistics can play a role in the improved integration and utilization of mainstream and community language study in schools. Possibilities include teaching about language variation/multilingualism in schools so that heritage speakers can better understand how and why their home language may differ from the standard variety, or approaches which help multilingual pupils capitalize on their knowledge of a home language in the English or languages classroom. Contributions are welcome in relation to any community language.
Contact Eva Eppler (e.eppler@roehampton.ac.uk) with any questions.
===========================
Directions in linguistics and social justice
Recent years have seen a growth in calls for educational and research institutions to acknowledge their role in shaping assumptions about racial and global hierarchies. In many ways, there is a well-established body of linguistics research that examines a range of topics related to aspects of inequality and social justice (cf. Alim et al. 2016, 2020, Rosa 2019, Labov 2008). However, there is demand – and indeed an urgency – for a broader spectrum of linguistics sub-disciplines to engage with these issues, even where they are not the explicit object of study (Charity Hudley 2008, Ameka & Terkourafi 2019, DeGraff 2020, Deumert et al. 2021). We invite submissions that seek to engage with topics related to linguistics and social justice as broadly construed, including but not limited to:
- Decolonising the linguistics curriculum, questions of pedagogy and/or curriculum,
- Linguistic educational policy or practice more broadly;
- Issues of (in)equality in student and staff recruitment to HEIs and linguistics;
- Access and inclusion in linguistics;
- Theoretical models and approaches;
- Research practices;
- Questions of agency (students or staff)
We expect – and welcome – ‘work in progress’. This includes exploratory talks and interactive sessions which raise questions or make suggestions in terms of practice in the field; as well as personal reflections, narratives, and creative responses to the topic. We explicitly welcome submissions from students, as well as those who belong to under-represented and marginalised groups.
Contact Laura Bailey (L.R.Bailey@kent.ac.uk) with any questions.
===========================
Particles in African languages
Across studies in African linguistics, although major parts of speech have been studied extensively, it has become increasingly apparent in recent years that the grammatical category of particles has received less scholarly attention.
Particles typically perform grammatical function and often aid the expression of subtle semantic or context-sensitive or pragmatic effects. Examples of particles inAfrican language include question particles, negative particles, TAM particles, directional/path particles and particles related to focus and information structure, often distinguishing exclusive, scalar and additive focus, as well as discourse notions such as background or mirativity.
To investigate the scope, meanings and functions of particles this session aims to compare data from specific languages or across different African languages. We invite papers adopting a descriptive, comparative or theoretical approach, on the following topics:
- What discourse, communicative, and semantic functions do particles have?
- Do particles have multiple functions and if so, what relations are there between the different functions?
- What is the scope of epistemic uses of particles (to express expectation, doubt, surprise)?
- What are the morphological characteristics of particles in different African languages and cross-linguistically?
- Are particles associated with specific syntactic constraints or distributions?
- Are there typological patterns related to (systems of) particles across different languages?
- What are possible diachronic developments of participles?
- What internal and contact-induced changes can be observed in the functions of specific particles?
- Do similar functions of particles appear genetically and/or regionally?
- How robust is our understanding of particles as a grammatical category, e.g. vis-à-vis adverbs or ideophones?
Contact Nancy Kula (nckula@essex.ac.uk) with any questions.
Contact
If you have any questions about abstract submissions or about the conference, you can contact us at conference@lagb.org.uk