Visiting Senior Fellow: Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies
Sally Thomason has been a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies for March, 2009.
Sally recently gave an invited lecture at the Workshop on Language Contact at FRAIS entitled, “Contact-induced language change sociolinguistics vs. historical linguistics?”
Abstract:
In studying language change, sociolinguists and historical linguists address the issues from very different perspectives. Sociolinguists focus on ongoing change; historical linguists study past changes. At least in part because of this difference in perspective, it sometimes seems as if the two groups of scholars are talking past each other rather than to each other. In this paper I’ll argue that the respective sets of data should in fact permit compatible analyses, because any viable theory must surely encompass both synchronic variation and diachronic change.