Call for Papers: SHEL 4

SHEL-4, the fourth annual conference on Studies in the History of the English Language, will be held at Northern Arizona University, in Flagstaff Arizona on September 30, October 1 and 2, 2005. We are very pleased that William Labov and Roger Lass will be plenary speakers at SHEL-4.

Faculty, graduate students, and independent scholars are invited to submit abstracts for 20-minute papers on any linguistic or philological aspect of the history of English. Papers from a range of linguistic and philological subfields, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, stylistics, metrics, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, language acquisition, contact, and change, as well as differing theoretical and methodological perspectives, are welcome. We are planning to host two workshops, on corpus linguistics and language change, and on pedagogy respectively. We welcome proposals for 20-minute workshop presentations.

Abstracts are due July 1, 2005. Abstracts, no longer than 500 words, can be submitted as e-mail attachments, as electronic submissions from the conference web site, or in hard copy through regular mail. All abstracts will undergo anonymous review. If sending the abstract as an attachment or in hard copy, please include author name and contact info, as well as the paper title, on a separate page; include only a title but no author information on the abstract itself. Please send abstracts as PDF files if they contain any specialized fonts.

Submit abstracts on-line or send them to: Susan Fitzmaurice, College of Arts & Letters, Box 5064, Northern Arizona University. Flagstaff, AZ 86011-5064, Susan.Fitzmaurice@nau.edu

• Special Sessions

Special session: Pedagogy Workshop (Teaching the History of the English Language)
Session organizer: Susanmarie Harrington (Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis)

SHEL-4 will continue the tradition of including a History of English Language pedagogy workshop, allowing participants to share ideas about teaching HEL and discuss challenges and opportunities offered by the place of HEL requirements in English and Education programs. Proposals are invited on any aspect of HEL pedagogy, such as the use of electronic resources in HEL, innovative assignment or examination formats, the use of corpus or linguistic atlas data, the structure of research into earlier and more recent periods of language history, ways to bring together linguistic basics (like phonology) with broader sociolinguistic issues (like attitudes about language diversity and change). Participation in the pedagogy workshop need not preclude the presentation of a research paper at another point in the conference.

Please send abstracts or inquiries for the workshop to Susanmarie directly at sharrin@iupui.edu

Special Session: Language and Meter
Organizer: Donka Minkova (UCLA)

The frequently assumed connection between the evolution of metrical forms and linguistic change in English raises many questions of interest to historical linguists and literary and cultural historians. Is verse a legitimate source of information for reconstructing language change and why? How does one isolate and analyze innovations or archaic/conservative phonological and grammatical forms in verse? Is the loss of synthetic forms related directly to the abandonment of the traditional Germanic verse patterns? How much metrical "memory" can persist in a bilingual culture? Are there purely "English" metrical forms? Who are the metrical innovators and how are their innovations shaped by the ambient language and culture? How are older metrical forms rendered for the modern reader? Why has English verse abandoned meter? Colleagues are invited to submit paper proposals on these and any other historical verse- and meter-related topics.

Send your abstracts to: Minkova@humnet.UCLA.edu