This award will support a workshop on the Generative Syntax of the Older Indo-European languages, held in conjunction with the 10th biennial meeting of the Diachronic Generative Syntax (DiGS) Conference at Cornell University in August, 2008. DiGS is the leading gathering of diachronic generative syntacticians in the world, providing workshop participants with a major audience for their research. The workshop will be an unprecedented event bringing together leading specialists on comparative Indo-European with major researchers working on syntactic change in a generative framework. A major focus will be on younger researchers actively combining the tools of Indo-European linguistics with current generative models of syntactic change. This award will support travel for graduate student participants, and the workshop will include a session for poster presentations. Selected papers will be published in an edited volume.
The workshop will be of importance to two disciplinary areas and groups of researchers. The first is the community of linguists (and scholars in related fields such as psychology and cognitive science) who study language as a formal system. This conference will help make the community aware of the importance of issues related to language change. The second impacted group is the community of scholars involved in the historical/comparative study of the Indo-European family. This is a small but traditionally influential group of scholars within the larger field of historical/comparative linguistics. The conference and ensuing publication will serve to bring these scholars into contact with generative work on syntactic change, and vice versa.
