Click here for the conference homepage. Invited speakers are Cynthia Allen , Ted Briscoe , Susan Pintzuk , Ian Roberts and Dianne Jonas . The goal of this meeting is to provide a forum for the discussion of recent work on historical change in syntactic systems in the context of generative grammar.
Historical change constitutes a particular form of variation.
If one can isolate points of variation in this way, one can then ask why the new system should have emerged in children at a certain point in time, and this may illuminate the way in which children acquire their syntactic capacities. Within this perspective, the study of language change is fused with work on language variation and the acquisition of language . The meeting will focus on the syntactic effects of changes in inflectional systems , for example examining the effects of the loss of morphological case systems. It is an old intuition that languages with rich inflection have a different kind of syntax from languages with poor inflection. So the meeting will address a major question in syntactic theory and extend the dialogue between historical linguists and acquisitionists , on the assumption that their work is mutually enlightening.