First APiCS conference 5-8 November 2009

From Apics

The First APiCS conference

APiCS conference 5-8 November 2009 - schedule, participants, accommodation

at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig (Germany)

Start: Thursday, 5 November 2009, 14h00

End: Sunday, 8 November 2009, 13h00

Invited speakers

• Bernard Comrie
• Michael Cysouw
• Tom Güldemann
• Bernd Kortmann
• Mikael Parkvall

contact: Susanne Michaelis (michaelis@eva.mpg.de) and Claudia Schmidt (cschmidt@eva.mpg.de)

The APiCS project is now fairly advanced, and it is time to discuss some preliminary results. Therefore, we are organizing a larger conference, also involving some comparative linguists from outside the project. For this conference, the editors are making the full APiCS database available to all participating APiCS contributors and invited speakers. A preliminary quantitative evaluation from various perspectives will thus be possible. The First APiCS Conference will be held at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, 5 - 8 November 2009, and we hope that quite a few APiCS contributors will be able to come. We also hope that a lot of interested people from outside the project will join us for this important conference. We will have a handful of invited outside speakers who will look at the APiCS data from a typological perspective: Bernard Comrie, Bernd Kortmann, Mikael Parkvall, Michael Cysouw, Tom Güldemann. The APiCS contributors attending the conference could make contributions of different kinds:

(i) a cross-linguistic paper (investigation of one/two features across the APiCS languages), based on the preliminary APiCS database

(ii) a language-specific paper on your language; if your language is little-known in the community, you might just give an overview of its structure

(iii) you could also present some issues that arose for you during your work on the dataset for your language, or anything else related to APiCS

(iv) finally, you could also come without a presentation, and just participate by joining the discussions (regardless of whether you are funded by us)

In addition to the conference presentations and discussions, we will discuss general APiCS issues such as the design of the online version of APiCS (a prototype should exist by November), as well as the content of the survey chapters.