Start Date: 10/28/2026 7:00 PM EDT
End Date: 10/28/2026 8:30 PM EDT
Organization Name:
Linguistic Society of America (LSA)
Contact:
LSA Presidential Research Forum: Frameworks, Findings and Methods in Sociosyntax
Wednesday, October 28, 2026, 7:00-8:30 PM ET
Moderator/Discussant: Alicia Beckford Wassink, LSA President (U of Washington, Seattle)
Speakers:
Alexandra d'Arcy (U of Victoria, BC)
Kirby Conrad (Swarthmore)
Heidi Harley (U of Arizona)
The last 10 years (or so) have seen a surge in scholarship that explicitly calls itself "sociosyntax." What *is* sociosyntax? Is there any emerging agreement about its research aims, methods, types and amounts of data, or theoretical assumptions or priorities? This 90-minute event will bring together scholars of different theoretical bents (who may call themselves sociolinguists, sociosyntacticians, syntacticians, or another label) to discuss contemporary approaches to studying morpho-syntactic phenomena with attention to a range of social topics, including, but not limited to: the social matrix of language acquisition, syntactic aspects of code-switching, social function, social stratification of syntactic variation, the interaction between language internal and external conditioning factors, or a historical perspective that centers grammatical change. We will spend time chatting about the value of making (or not) connections to linguistic theory outside of sociolinguistics.
