The 13th International Diachronic Generative Syntax Conference

Welcome to DiGS

The Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania is pleased to be hosting the thirteenth meeting of DiGS, the Conference on Diachronic Generative Syntax, on June 2-5, 2011. For the past twenty years, DiGS has been the leading international forum for the presentation of research on historical syntax from a generative perspective. The conference features work combining the historical and the formal investigation of syntactic phenomena, aiming to establish the proper relationship between two basic facts of language:

• Languages are constrained by the properties of the pan-human biological faculty of language.
• Languages and dialects, with the diversity that we observe among them, are the products of historical processes.

Important links

• Workshop: Using annotated corpora for diachronic research
• Preliminary conference program
• Conference site and local information (including travel and accomodations)

Registration information

Registration fees will be as follows:

• Early registration (extended through Friday, May 20):
  • Non-students: $40
  • Students: $20
• Late/on-site registration:
  • Non-students: $60
  • Students: $40
• Attendance at the banquet: an additional $50
• Registration fees, both in advance and on-site, will be paid by credit card.
• Website for conference registration

Funding from the NSF and other sources will support travel subventions of $150 - $200 for student presenters at both the main conference and the poster sessions. Please note that funding will be available both for US and non-US student presenters. Application instructions for the subvention will be sent shortly after notification of abstract acceptance.

Accommodations

We have arranged for accommodations at a somewhat reduced group rate at the Sheraton Philadelphia University City Hotel, which is located one block from the Penn campus and the equivalent of three blocks from the conference site. Reservations can be made by following the link below:

• Website for DIGS accommodations at the University City Sheraton

Plenary speakers

The conference will include a keynote address by

• David Lightfoot, Georgetown University

and plenary addresses by:

• Enoch Aboh, University of Amsterdam
• Caroline Heycock, University of Edinburgh
• Thomas McFadden, University of Tromsø
• Ana Maria Martins, University of Lisbon
• Ian Roberts, Cambridge University

Titles and abstracts for the keynote and plenary addresses can be found in the preliminary conference program.

Historical Corpus Workshop

DiGS 13 will feature an all-day multi-session workshop on corpus-based and quantitative methods in diachronic research. The workshop is funded by a grant for conference support from the NSF and will be held during the day of Thursday, June 2. The conference proper will open with David Lightfoot's keynote address on the evening of the same day.

The goal of the workshop is to introduce researchers to the use of syntactically annotated corpora for grammatical and diachronic investigations, including dynamical systems analysis of the time course of changes. The workshop will provide hands-on exposure to corpus annotation schemes, to search tools, and to techniques of statistical analysis. Workshop sessions will be led by faculty and advanced graduate students from Penn and elsewhere. Detailed information on workshop organization and curriculum can be found here. Workshop registrants will be eligible for reduced fee licenses for the Penn Historical Parsed Corpora series.

Contact us

For more information on the conference and/or the workshop, please contact the organizers at digs13@ling.upenn.edu.

DiGS 13 Sponsors:

Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania
School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania
US National Science Foundation