Event

UA Hosts Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages

The Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, widely recognized as the most prestigious annual conference in Romance linguistics, was held at the University of Arizona campus March 27-29, 2009. This highly selective symposium continues a 39 year-old tradition of annual conferences on the topic of Romance linguistics. It is sponsored and organized by different scholars at North American institutions each year. Recent conferences (2000-2008) have been held at the University of Florida, University of Illinois-Chicago, University of Toronto, Indiana University, University of Utah, University of Texas at Austin, and Rutgers University, University of Pittsburgh and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A truly international conference, the LSRL attracts a significant number of scholars of Romance linguistics, traveling from the US, Canada, Europe and South America. This year's program featured talks in syntax, phonology, phonetics, morphophonology, sociolinguistics, bilingualism, language contact, and language acquisition, representing various dialects of Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, Romanian, Catalan, older varieties of these languages, and Romance creoles. The Parasession was organized around the topic of Language Change and Variation; Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero (U of Manchester), Gillian Sankoff (U of Pennsylvania) and Karen Zagona (U of Washington) were the plenary speakers.

The conference was generously supported by the UA Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the College of Humanities, the Office of the Associate Vice President for Research, The Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain's Ministry of Culture and US Universities, the Departments of Linguistics, Anthropology, French and Italian, the Program in Cognitive Science, The Center for Latin American Studies, the Center for Educational Resources in Culture, Learning and Literacy (CERCLL), and the Program in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT). For more information, go to: http://w3.coh.arizona.edu/lsrl39/.