About

A well attested empirical fact about natural language is its ever-changing nature: languages change continuously over time and space. Undeniably, language variation remains one of the most endearing topics for typologists, sociolinguists, theoretical linguists and psycholinguists alike. This workshop aims to bring together scholars using different approaches and methodologies to present on varied aspects of variation, and debate and deliberate on possible common grounds to view and understand the phenomenon. Some broad questions that will be addressed in the workshop are:

1. What underlies variation? To what extent is human language variation driven by social, processing and/or grammar-internal factors?
2. What is the nature of interaction between social, processing and grammatical factors? How do value changes of structural parameters impact, and in turn get affected, by social and processing matters?
3. What is the extent of variation? Do some linguistic phenomena change faster than the others, and if so why? What insights do these studies provide for the layout or architecture of grammar?

While linguistic variation has been, and is continuously been addressed on multiple platforms by Indian linguists and language researchers, there has not been enough effort in engaging linguists over the above-stated questions. Likewise, students and researchers interested in language variation are not exposed to multiple perspectives of the phenomenon. The workshop aims to fill in this lacuna by engaging both established researchers and students in different aspects of language variation.

Additionally, owing to the location of the workshop, we will have an immense wealth of empirical data from Indian languages brought to the table. This workshop will provide an ideal ground where different perspectives on variation will be directly tried and tested out against the multiple languages spoken in the Indian sub-continent.