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University of Victoria
Alexandra D’Arcy is Professor of Linguistics and Director of the Sociolinguistics Research Lab (SLRL) at the University of Victoria (Canada). She specializes in the study of language variation and change, combining quantitative modelling with her interest in theoretical linguistics. She has published widely on lexical, phonological, syntactic, morphosyntactic, and discourse-pragmatic variation and change, both from a synchronic and from a diachronic point of view. Her current project examines the role of children in advancing language change.
“Children inherit the history of [a] language as they learn it” (Labov 1989:85). This powerful and provocative understanding of the continuity of stable variability and stable constraints on variation over time and generations is why Labov (1989) described the child as “a perfect historian of the language.” This understanding is reflected in historical accounts more generally, such that system-internal evolution is described as the preservation of the “unbroken sequences of native-language acquisition by children” (Ringe et al. 2002:63), resulting in the transmission of the structural detail—categorical and variable—of adult language (e.g. Labov 2007). It is therefore possible to make the claim that “all language is an historical residue” (Labov 1989:85). At the same time, children learn language in conversation—where “language lives and breathes,” entailing that “when a language is passed down through generations, it is passed down by means of conversation” (Enfield 2017:3). In this talk, I examine child speech in conversational data to make two broad points. The first is that ongoing language change is also historical residue with which children must not only contend but also engage as part of their linguistic mastery. And the second is that children’s unambiguous success as ‘linguistic historians’ supports an understanding of variation (and thus change) not only as a basic design feature of language but also as a feature with beneficial outcomes for language learners and users (see, for example, Gardner et al. 2022).
Selected References
Enfield, N.J. 2017. How we talk. The inner workings of conversation. New York: Basic Books.
Gardner, M.H., E. Uffing, N. Van Vaeck & B. Szmrecsanyi. 2021. Variation isn’t that hard: Morphosyntactic choice does not predict production difficulty. PLOS ONE 16, e0252602.
Labov, W. 1989. The child as linguistic historian. Language Variation and Change 1:85–97.
Labov, W. 2007. Transmission and diffusion. Language 83:344–387.
Ringe, D., T. Warnow & A. Taylor. 2002. Indo-European and computational cladistics. Transactions of the Philological Society 100:59–129.
University of the Basque Country
María del Pilar García Mayo is Full Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of the Basque Country (Spain) and Honorary Professor at University College London (UK). She is the director of the research group Language and Speech (www.laslab.org). One of the strands in her research is grounded in generative linguistic theory and focuses on second and third language acquisition, specifically on various aspects of English grammatical structure in bilingual Basque-Spanish speakers. A second line of research delves into cognitive-interactionist theory, examining the impact of conversational interactions on language development in low-input, foreign language settings.
Grammar is crucial to language and language learning. Research into grammar instruction (i.e. interventional efforts to direct learners’ attention to particular grammatical forms) has been a central topic in the field of second language acquisition (SLA) due to its importance in assisting second language (L2) learners to develop communicative competence. Over the last three decades, the role of grammar instruction in second/foreign language contexts has been reconsidered on the basis of findings in the field of L2 research with adult learners. Studies highlight the need to identify effective instructional procedures to focus on formal aspects of language, enabling learners to notice the mismatch between their interlanguage and the target language. Moreover, there is now broad consensus that pedagogical intervention is facilitative and may even be indispensable in foreign language (FL) learning contexts, where learners receive minimal L2 input- typically only a few hours per week.
Although the early learning of English as a foreign language (EFL) in school settings has grown exponentially over the past twenty years, one population that remains underexplored regarding these issues is children aged 6-12. This talk will share ways in which interactive collaborative tasks can draw children’s attention to formal aspects of English. Our research, grounded within cognitive-interactionist and sociocultural frameworks, demonstrates how grammar focused tasks, input enhancement and collaborative writing – combined with the manipulation of implementation variables (task repetition, task modality) and explicit metalinguistic explanations- help children focus on formal aspects of the language. Importantly, these instructional procedures enable children to resolve problematic issues without teacher intervention. We will conclude by identifying challenges and further research directions for effective grammar pedagogy for young learners.
Heidelberg University
University of Edinburgh
Graeme Trousdale is Professor of Linguistics and English Language at the School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences of the University of Edinburgh (Scotland). His main research interests involve constructionalization and constructional change, English historical linguistics, cognitive linguistics, including studies on regularity and creativity in both language and music. His latest research focuses on word-formation change in Word Grammar and the diachronic development of morphological constructions.
Certain interjections, like wow, blimey and my word, can be used by speakers of different varieties of English to convey surprise at an unexpected event or state. In other languages, such as Turkish, it has been argued that the speaker’s unpreparedness of mind can be coded in the morphology of the language (Aksu-Koç and Slobin 1986). Thus languages appear to vary to the extent to which surprise or unpreparedness of mind are grammaticalized: while all speakers are capable of expressing surprise, the extent to which the expression of surprise constitutes a grammatical category in a language is fluid. The status, nature and development of this linguistic category (mirativity) has been vigorously debated in the literature (see among others DeLancey 2001, Hill 2012, Rett and Murray 2013, Petersen 2016, Sahoo and Lemmens 2017).
In this talk, I present a discussion of the issues as they relate to the expression of mirativity in English, drawing on notions in both cognitive linguistics and historical linguistics. Three case studies form the basis of the argument put forward. These are:
These case studies complement a range of other investigations into mirative marking in English (e.g. Celle and Lansari 2015, Serrano-Losada 2018, Krauss 2019). Together, these studies suggest that speakers of English have, over time, developed a range of mirative strategies. This leads to the final part of the talk, where I consider what linguists actually mean when they say that a certain expression is “grammatical(ized)” in English, and how this relates more broadly to theoretical positions regarding the relationship between language structure and language use.
University of Freiburg
[Presidential address]
Bernd Kortmann, President of the International Society for the Linguistics of English, is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Freiburg (Germany) and Speaker of the Board of Directors of the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS). A specialist in English and areal European linguistics, his main research interest focuses on the comparative grammar of non-standard varieties of English around the world, especially from a typological perspective.
As befits a Presidential address on the occasion of an ISLE conference with the ambitious umbrella theme “English Linguistics on the Way: Expanding Horizons”, I will dare a look at likely topics, approaches, practices, but also major challenges and responsibilities of the next generation of experienced and early career researchers in our thriving discipline. Issues to be addressed prominently include the following:
