Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB 2024)

(Newcastle University, Newcastle, United Kingdom, 27th - 30th August 2024)

Henry Sweet Lecture 2024

Dr Heather Burnett (Université de Paris)

Linguistics Association Lecture 2024

Prof. Silvina Montrul (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

Call for papers & posters

The Linguistics Association of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’s (LAGB) Annual Meeting welcomes abstract submissions from all subfields of linguistics to capture the diversity of linguistics research in the UK and beyond. LAGB 2024 will not only feature our usual general sessions that will run throughout the conference, but will also include themed sessions. Abstracts can be submitted to be included in the general sessions, poster sessions or as part of a themed session (see details below).  Both members and non-members are invited to offer papers for the meeting. All abstracts will be blind-peer-reviewed by an international committee of reviewers. The length for all papers delivered at the LAGB 2024 meeting is 20 minutes (plus 10 minutes discussion). The deadline for submissions is 5PM UK Time on 8 April 2024. 

Special features of LAGB 2024

• Beginning with the Annual Meeting in Newcastle, the LAGB will publish online proceedings of the conference.  More details and guidelines for papers will be announced in due course.
• The local organisers are arranging an inclusive conference, with sensory rooms and quiet spaces, including for eating at lunch/breaks.
• The local organisers are also looking into providing child-care services for the conference.

Formatting guidelines

To ensure that we are able to consider your abstract, please ensure that it adheres to the following guidelines:

• Maximum of two single-spaced A4 pages (in PDF format) with margins of at least 2.5cm on all sides. This includes references.
• Font size 12 in Times New Roman.
• Submitted anonymously, with no indication of the author’s identity.

Themed Sessions

LAGB 2024 will feature two themed sessions which are open to submissions. Details are found below. When you submit your abstract, please select the relevant theme from the list provided. 

The Philosophy of Linguistics

The philosophy of linguistics is a growing area of interest for a number of philosophers and linguists. Linguistics as a science has developed at a very fast pace over the last 50 years, and the philosophy of linguistics offers a way to reflect on that development, identify important trends or commitments shared by linguists, and consider the future shape of linguistics. The philosophy of linguistics can be viewed as the philosophy of science applied to linguistics, and thus shares many of the broad interests as are found in the literature on the philosophy of science as applied to other sciences such as physics, chemistry, or biology. The philosophy of linguistics is interested in questions concerning the ontology of linguistics (what is linguistics about? What is its subject matter?); the methodology of linguistics (What role should intuitions play in linguistics? What is the value of grammaticality judgements in linguistic theorising?); and specific debates over the nature of language, such as debates concerning language acquisition, language evolution, and the philosophical implications of linguistic theories. The field is thus wide and there are significant issues and questions that require continued and enhanced focus through interdisciplinary collaborations between philosophers, linguists, and other working in language-related domains.

The aim of this themed session is to provide a venue for both a consideration of the ‘state of the field’ in the philosophy of linguistics, and consideration of new developments in the philosophy of linguistics, to reflect on where the philosophy of linguistics is and where it will go in the future.

The session will include talks that are focused on a range of topics or questions within the philosophy of linguistics, including but not limited to AI and Large Language Models, the ontology and metaphysics of linguistics, the methodology of linguistics, and the philosophical implications of contemporary and historical linguistic theories. The aim is to allow maximum space for contributors to discuss what they see as the most important and critically issues facing the philosophy of linguistics and to freely reflect on the progress that has been made within the field.

Contact Dr James Miller (james.miller@durham.ac.uk) with any questions. 

Heritage Languages in the UK

The designation “heritage language” is a somewhat controversial term in multilingualism research, broadly applying to languages learned in the home that are not the dominant language in the users’ environment (Rothman 2009, Montrul 2016). Moreover, heritage language users are thought typically to diverge from monolingual users of the same language, or multilingually-raised users for whom the language at issue is dominant. In Polinsky and Scontras’s (2019: 5), “heritage languages show what stays and what undergoes change when a language system is disrupted.” This applies not only to competence and performance, but may also apply to issues of processing (e.g. Putnam and Sánchez 2013, Montrul and Foote 2014) such as lexical access.

The factors that lead to divergence in the system vary from context to context. However, to date, a large proportion of the work conducted on heritage languages has concerned non-dominant languages in North America, particularly due to heritage language streams in second language education (e.g. Montrul 2010). Though some work based in Europe also exists, e.g. in Norway, Germany, and the UK, North American-based work predominates. This affects the extent to which we can evaluate current findings in the literature, not least because the UK heritage language situation differs from North America in a number of ways:

- The presence of different heritage languages due to the UK’s colonial past and migration schemes, e.g. large, long-established and linguistically vibrant communities of users of Indo-Aryan languages (Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Pahari-Pothwari, i.a.; see Hussain 2015)

- Different attitudes towards and visibility of certain languages in the UK compared with the US, e.g. Spanish (e.g. Guijarro-Fuentes and Marinis (2011), Cazzoli-Goeta & Young-Scholten 2011)

- Different approaches to signed languages within GB and NI (e.g. greater governmental support of BSL in Scotland)

These sociopolitical differences have ramifications for the amount of exposure to the heritage language, contexts of exposure and age of acquisition, amongst other factors. Some studies have suggested that these factors affect heritage language realisation within the same language pairs (e.g. Kupisch and Rothman 2018). However, some language communities are still much less well studied than others (compare Spanish-speaking communities with e.g. Pahari-Pothwari-speaking communities or communities using BSL) and much remains to be uncovered about the profile of a heritage speaker on different language levels, including morphosyntax, phonology, semantics and co-speech gesture. We therefore welcome papers from across language modules that advance our knowledge of UK heritage language users’ production, comprehension, attitudes and perspectives.

Contact Rebecca Woods (rebecca.woods@newcastle.ac.uk) with any questions. 

LAGB 2024 will also feature a special session in association with the LAGB Education Committee. Details can be found below. Note that this panel is not open to submissions.

Languages uptake in education: Obstacles and interventions

It is now well-established that there has been a marked and continued decline in the numbers of pupils studying languages in UK Secondary and Further Education, with clear knock-on effects for university uptake: departments continue to close; cold-spots in access to languages provision in Higher Education are now emerging, resulting in fewer would-be teachers undertaking teacher training in the discipline (see British Academy 2020, Muradás-Taylor & Taylor 2023). While this “languages crisis” is well documented (Bowler 2020), the perspectives of pupils and teachers themselves have not been adequately explored, and are rarely considered, (but see Collen et al. 2023, Henderson and Carruthers 2022). This special session of the LAGB brings together teachers and academics to address two aims. First, we seek to better understand the obstacles to uptake of languages in schools and Higher Education. Second, we will consider what practical interventions could be developed by working collaboratively across the sector (see Sheehan et al. 2023).

Contact Michelle Sheehan (michelle.sheehan1@newcastle.ac.uk) or Jonathan Kasstan (j.kasstan@westminster.ac.uk) with any questions.