Morphosyntactic interference in heritage languages – our workshop

by Jeanette Sakel

Experts in heritage language grammars came to UWE Bristol yesterday to take part in a workshop on Morphosyntactic interference in heritage languages. Co-organized by Petros Karatsareas and Jeanette Sakel, it was part-funded by UWE and the British Academy (through Petros’ BA postdoctoral fellowship).

It was a thoroughly enjoyable workshop, with a lot of exciting new data, methodologies, and findings. The most valuable part, I found, was that despite the different theoretical approaches of the delegates (from sociolinguistics, typology, cognitive linguistics to generative grammar), we all reunited in the way we approached and analysed our data – and the theoretical aspects felt like an ‘add on’ that rarely resurfaced.

Both Petros and I learnt a lot – and I was inspired by new research that will make its way into a textbook I’m writing on bilingualism and language contact (CUP 2016 or thereabouts).

Here are a few images from the workshop – thank you everyone who took part, and in particular Petros, who did a great job instigating (and organizing the vast bulk of) the event!

The images below are not fully in chronological order. The first one is of our plenary speaker: Jason Rothman (University of Reading and UiT The Arctic University of Norway):

[please click on the photos for a large version of each image]

There were papers by Terje Lohndal, Marit Westergaard, Artemis Alexiadou, Irina Krueger, Elif Bamyaci, Gyanam Mahajan, Izolda Wolski-Moskoff, Sandra Birzer, Julia Hofweber and Lameen Souag, as well as an introduction and round-up of the event by Petros Karatsareas and myself. Here are some of the speakers:

Terje Lohndal:

Irina Krueger:

Elif Bamyaci:

Gyanam Mahajan:

Izolda Wolski-Moskoff:

Sandra Birzer:

Julia Hofweber:

Lameen Souag:

Some images of the audience and the discussions:

And a rare image of myself with two other delegates (thank you for the photographer duties on this one, Jeanine Treffers-Daller! And apologies for the odd personalized settings on my camera!):

And finally: our great organizer: Petros Karatsareas (both before the event, getting ready to welcome our guests). Thank you Petros!