Slavic Linguistics Society Conference

September 19-21, 2014

The Slavic Linguistics Society (SLS) 2014 conference is the ninth annual meeting of the society. SLS is a professional organization devoted to the systematic scholarly study of the Slavic languages. It brings together academics from several continents through an annual conference that alternates between North American and European institutions.

Slavic linguistics has long been an interdisciplinary field, drawing on the study of individual languages, on cultural and literary investigations, and on history. It has been fueled largely by the recognition that the languages, and the cultures associated with them, despite their many differences, show remarkable convergence on a number of characteristics as a result of sustained and intense contact among speakers of these various languages for centuries, and as such offer the perfect case study in linguistic and cultural development of "genetically" closely related populations.

Slavic Linguistics Society seeks to promote dialogue across different sub-disciplines of linguistics, theoretical frameworks, and language specializations. SLS conferences are exceptional opportunities for cross-field discussions, as they bring together scholars pursuing different theoretical approaches including formal linguistics, sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, and many more.

This variety, richness and depth of the field is reflected by the different approaches to the study of Slavic languages pursued by the three invited speakers. Greville Corbett (University of Surrey) is a linguistic typologist par excellence. He founded the Surrey Morphology Group, which conducts very broad cross-linguistic studies of morphological and morphosyntactic aspects of languages. Roumyana Pancheva (University of Southern California)’s work focuses on syntax and on the interface between syntax and semantics and employs formal modeling, cross-linguistic comparison and experimentation. Olga Yokoyama (University of California, Los Angeles)’s research covers functional syntax and semantics, discourse grammar and modeling, translation theory and gender linguistics.

The 2014 SLS Conference is organized jointly by the Slavic Languages & Literatures and Linguistics departments. It is co-sponsored by the Simpson Center for the Humanities, Office of the Dean, Arts & Sciences, and the Slavic Linguistics Society.