SALA-31: Call for Papers ======================== The thirty-first South Asian Languages Analysis Roundtable (SALA-31) will be held at Lancaster University from Thursday 14th May to Saturday 16th May 2015. SALA-31 aims to present a range of contributions from right across the spectrum of linguistic disciplines, on as inclusive a basis as possible. We consider any kind of descriptive, theoretical, or applied linguistic research concerning one or more of the languages of South Asia – broadly defined – to be within scope for this event. The areas in which we particularly welcome submissions include but are not limited to: • Descriptive studies of any aspect of a South Asian language or languages o (including: syntax, semantics, lexis, morphology, phonology, phonetics) • Theoretical analysis within any framework – formal or functional • Cognitive and psycholinguistic investigation; • Typological studies; • Pragmatics and discourse analysis (of any kind); • Sociolinguistics o (including: regional and social variation; bilingualism; language in culture and society; language attitudes) • Historical linguistics and language change; • Philology; • Comparative, contrastive and translation studies; • Computational linguistics, language modelling, and NLP; • Corpus linguistic investigation and analysis; • Quantitative linguistics; • Language documentation; • Preservation of endangered languages; • Development of language resources and datasets including corpora, software tools, lexicons, and grammars; • Language learning, acquisition, and teaching. The following speakers have accepted our invitation to give plenary lectures at SALA-31: • Miriam Butt • Carol Genetti • Sonal Kulkarni-Joshi • Ulrich Pagel and Nathan Hill With this announcement, we issue our main Call for Papers. Submitting an abstract ====================== We invite submission of abstracts for papers and for panel discussions on any of the topics mentioned above. For SALA-31, we request extended abstracts (750-1500 words); no request will be made for full written papers. All abstracts will be peer-reviewed by the organising committee. Those that are accepted will be included in the conference abstract book. Paper presentations will consist of a 20 minute talk followed by 10 minutes for questions and discussion. We are open to various types of paper presentation – including but not limited to discussion papers, reports of research complete or in progress, and research software demonstrations. Panel discussions will consist of an extended session (1 hour or 1.5 hours) containing either multiple individual presentations on a theme, or an extended joint presentation. Allocation of time within the panel timeslot is the responsibility of the lead presenter (who should also be the one to submit the abstract). Submissions for panels should take the form of a single 1500 word abstract on behalf of all speakers to be on the panel. All speakers should be named. The abstract should include a note to specify whether the panel is intended to be 1 hour or 1.5 hours in length. We especially encourage abstract submissions from early-career researchers, including postgraduate research students and postdoctoral researchers. All abstracts must be submitted via the conference website; the submission system is now live. All abstracts should be submitted as formatted files, using the conference stylesheet, which can be downloaded from our website: http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/sala-31/call.php Early notification: Authors who submit their abstracts by 14th November will receive early notification of whether the abstract has been accepted (within a week at most). Key dates ========= • 30th October 2014 – first Call For Papers • 14th November 2014 – early deadline for abstract submission • 20th November 2014 – notification of acceptance for any abstracts submitted before the early deadline • 24th December 2014 – final deadline for abstract submission • 16th January 2015 – last date for notification of acceptance for abstracts submitted between 15 Nov and 24 Dec • 16th January 2015 – earlybird registration opens • 8th February 2015 – earlybird registration ends (prices rise) • 12th April 2015 – end of guaranteed registration; last date for cancellation with refund • 14th May 2015 – conference begins. General information =================== The South Asian Languages Analysis (SALA) Roundtable is a long-established annual meeting for the dissemination of research of all kinds into the languages of South Asia. The first SALA Roundtable was organised in 1978 at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and since then SALA has been hosted by a long list of institutions in North America, South Asia, and Europe. SALA-31 will be held on the Lancaster University campus; see http://www.lancs.ac.uk/contact-and-getting-here/maps-and-travel/ for information. For all further information, see the conference website: http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/sala-31 SALA-31 is hosted by the UCREL research centre (http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk), which brings together the Department of Linguistics and English Language (http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/) with the School of Computing and Communications (http://www.scc.lancs.ac.uk/). Local organising committee of SALA-31: Andrew Hardie (chair), Tony McEnery, Claire Nance, Daniel van Olmen, Paul Rayson. Contact: sala31@lancaster.ac.uk