LIN 1256: Advanced Language Variation & Change
Language Contact, Corpora & Analysis

Course Description * Schedule * Reading * Assessment

Conference Report

NOTE: For this assignment, you need to attend at least part of one of the two big conferences taking place October 25-28, 2012.

• New Ways of Analyzing Variation, or NWAV 41, is taking place at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. (Quite a few linguists from the Linguistics Department will be going.) The program and other information is posted at http://www.indiana.edu/~nwav41/.
• The Road less travelled, an international conference on heritage languages and heritage language acquisition, is taking place at U of T (Victoria College) October 26-27. See http://individual.utoronto.ca/perezleroux/site/roadlesstravelled.html.

From the talks you attend (or posters you discuss with authors), select two that are relevant to this course. Summarize these two presentations and explain how each is connected to one or more of the course goals or “Big Questions.” You should write a critical assessment, not just a repetition of the presenter’s message. There are no length requirements.

Be sure to include a citation for each talk. Information on citation formats:

• APA guidelines for academic writing, especially for documenting sources. You might start with this tutorial. "APA" stands for the American Psychological Association, but this set of guidelines is used in many Social Science fields, including linguistics.
• How to cite an unpublished conference paper in APA.
• MLA (Modern Language Association) and the Chicago Manual of Style are other common sets of guidelines.
• Any of these are acceptable, but please choose one and use it consistently.