The International Society for the Linguistics of English, the New England Committee for ISLE 2, the English Department and Humanities Foundation of Boston University together announce the society’s second triennial conference.

The theme of the conference will be Methods Past and Current.

Recent studies in corpus linguistics, varieties and typologies, dialects and Standard English, as well as pragmatics prompt examination of methods found conducive to promising results. 

The choice of the conference’s theme stems from the widely shared view that methods of analysis involve at least the following related questions:

• How do methods of investigation take into account the data under study?
• In what ways do linguistic premises, perspectives, and models shape the methods to use?
• Which methods and models, developed in such disciplines as anthropology, cultural and demographic history, economics, psychology, and textual editing enhance linguistic analysis?
  Do current methods depart in significant ways from those typical of research in the past. 

More particular subthemes might include:

• For studies in corpus linguistics, diverse methods for investigating and analyzing regional, social, and cultural patterns in dialects, varieties, and Standard English.
• Under the topic typology, analyses of metrics from Old to Modern English, dialects and varieties, written and oral registers, and optimality theory as applied to sound change.
•  From the perspective of reception, methodological designs for perceptual dialectology.
• For the topic pragmatics, discussion of current methods that are used to determine and explain patterns and changes in the linguistic features of spoken and written English.

The theme and topics presented here outline but by no means exhaust the scope of proposals for talks, poster sessions, and workshops that the New England Committee invites for ISLE 2011. Although this outline of theme and topic is central to the Boston meeting, ISLE will accommodate, as much as possible, outstanding abstracts directed toward other issues.  The conference in Boston aims to provide an ample forum for members’ presentations and exchanges, formal and informal, on a wide range of topics..   

Eugene Green (eugreen@bu.edu) and Bruce Fraser (bfraser@bu.edu) of The New England Committee are glad to respond to preliminary inquiries.

The call for abstracts will be issued in June 2010, and a fully developed website for ISLE 2 in Boston will appear soon after.

MEMBERS OF THE NEW ENGLAND COMMITTEE FOR ISLE 2011

Faculty                  University                       Current Research

Daniel Donohue   Harvard                           Cognitive studies of Old English poetry

Bruce Fraser         Boston                              Pragmatics – discourse markers

Eugene Green       Boston                              Comparing Middle English and Yiddish

Stephen Harris      Massachusetts, Amherst   Studies in etymology

Janet McIntosh      Brandeis                          Dilemmas in narratives of former Kenyans

Charles Meyer       Massachusetts, Boston   Corpus linguistics: Modern English grammar

Geoffrey Russom  Brown                            Old English, Old Irish, Middle English meters

Margaret Thomas   Boston College              History of linguistics, Second language 
                                                                       acquisition theory

Photo courtesy of Boston University Photo Services
Website maintained by Jeffrey Heller (jeffhell@bu.edu)