LACUS Forum XXXIX: LANGUAGE VARIETIES

The 39th Forum of the Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States, under the presidency of Alan Melby, Brigham Young University, and chaired by Sheila Embleton, York University, took place from August 8th to August 11th, 2012, at York University, Toronto, Canada. Its proceedings took place in York University's Schulich School of Business, one of the leading institutions of its kind in Canada. The theme of the 2012 LACUS was 'language varieties', an area of study and research which covers both dialectal varieties, i.e., geographical, social, institutional and historical varieties, and all the language variations that occur in accordance with personal relations between speaker and hearer/writer and reader, social status, the choice of spoken or written media, and the object of the discourse. For example, Andrea Hòa Phạm looks at change in historical varieties in the paper 'Synchronic Evidence for a Historical Hypothesis: Vietnamese Palatals', and Ekaterina Shagalov & Jonathan Fine consider the characteristics of an institutional variety in 'Fluency and Semantics of Language in Schizophrenia and Mania'. It is customary in LACUS to consider for inclusion qualified papers which present research results outside the designated theme, and a number of the papers in this volume are not explicitly related to language varieties. Read more