DGfS 2023 workshop on “Coexistence, competition, and change …”

Next year’s annual meeting of the German Linguistics Society, DGfS 2023 (Cologne, March 8-10), will host a workshop on Coexistence, competition, and change: Structural borrowing and the dynamics of asymmetric language contact, organized by Hiwa Asadpour, Carolina Plaza-Pust, and Manfred Sailer. The workshop is part of the activities of the  informal special interest group  Dynamics of Asymmetric Language Contact  (DALC) that Carolina, Hiwa, and  Manfred have recently started. The workshop aims at bringing together various lines of research in the investigation of the dynamics of asymmetric language contact and change. Typically, language contact situations are characterized by variation, competition, and coexistence of linguistic features at different levels of linguistic analysis and their interfaces. These dynamics become apparent not only in the linguistic behaviour of bilingual speakers and signers (code-switching, code-mixing, code-blending, and cross-linguistic influence), but also in the evolution of spoken and sign languages over time (language change, emergence of new varieties, mixed languages, pattern transfer or calque). By approaching the dynamics of language contact from different theoretical perspectives, we aim to contribute to a better understanding of the outcomes of language contact. Our focus will be on contact phenomena at the syntactic level.

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