The 50th annual conference of the Australian Linguistic Society will be hosted by MacquarieUniversity in Sydney, from Wednesday 11th December to Friday 13th December 2019. An associated half-day of preconference workshops is scheduled for Tuesday 10th December.
The theme for the 50th ALS conference is Celebrating Diversity, in acknowledgement of the United Nations’ International Year of Indigenous Languages (IYIL2019). We will thus celebrate thediversity of participation in linguistics, as well as linguistic diversity itself. Human diversity, especially linguistic diversity, has been central to our evolutionary fitness and is fundamental to our continued survival on this planet. We must embrace this diversity if we are to properly understand our human faculties, nurture it and celebrate it for what it has brought us and where it will eventually take us.
We welcome a wide range of submissions across the languages of the world - Indigenous languages (from Australia and elsewhere), non-Indigenous global languages, migrant languages, sign languages, pidgins, creoles and mixed languages. As the Society hosts General Linguistics conferences, we invite submissions from all linguistic subfields, for presentations in the general sessions (20 minutes plus 5 minutes for questions), for posters, and for presentations within one of themed panels or preconference workshops listed below. Abstracts that are deemed to be outside the scope of the relevant panel or workshop will be considered for inclusion in the general sessions or poster sessions, and reviewed by the ALS program committee.
Main conference themed panels:
1. Language Variation and Change – Australia 4 (LVC-A 4). Organisers: Celeste Rodríguez Louro, Catherine Travis & James Walker.
2. Conversational narratives within small communities. Lesley Stirling, Joe Blythe, Ilana Mushin and Rod Gardner.
3. Grammatical Relations in Australian Languages. Organisers: Thomas Ennever & Mitchell Browne.
Pre-conference workshops:
1. Linguistics & Teaching Professionals. Organisers: Jean Mulder
2. Typical and atypical language development in the multilingual and multicultural context. Organisers: Weifeng Han & Chris Brebner.
4. Teaching Linguistics in Australian Universities. Organiser: Nick Wilson
Abstract Submissions
All abstract submissions are due by Sunday 4th August.
Abstracts for the regular talks and poster presentations will be anonymously reviewed by the ALS Program Committee. Acceptances notified: Early September
Each abstract must be a maximum of 1 A4 page of text including title. The abstract may also include 1 additional A4 page of examples, figures, references etc. Please prepare your abstract in Word (as a single .doc or .docx file), or pdf, in Times New Roman 12 point font, with 2cm on all margins. On the additional page, references only may appear in 10 point font. Examples, figures, tables must appear in 12 point font.
The abstract must be anonymous. It should not include any author names or affiliations. Please ensure you remove all identifying information from the document properties.
Each abstract should be submitted online via the ALS EasyChair website:
If you do not have an EasyChair account yet, you will have to create one for the purpose of this conference. To submit an abstract, you will need to both:
upload your abstract as one anonymous Word or PDF document and
paste the title and main text of your abstract into a text box within EasyChair.
As part of the EasyChair online submission form, you will also be asked for author & affiliation information, title, abstract, keywords and topics, your preferred presentation type (oral or poster presentation) and which panel/workshop, if any, you would like to present within. We strongly encourage a poster submission if your dataset lends itself well to graphical presentation, in-depth personal discussion. If you are submitting to a panel or workshops, please indicate if you would like the abstract to be also considered for the general sessions, in the event that it is not accepted by panel organisers.
Abstract review criteria
Each abstract will receive a general overall evaluation. The program committee will also consider the degree to which each abstract:
· situates the study within its research context and demonstrates a clear theoretical, methodological and/or practical contribution to the field,
coherently articulates its topic and objectives,
outlines the data being analysed and how it will be analysed,
is of potential interest to an ALS audience.
Further Information
For further information and updates please see the ALS website or send an email to the 2019 ALS Conference team: conf@als.asn.au.