The Closing Conference of the MPIEVA Linguistics Department - Diversity Linguistics: Retrospects and Prospects
This week was the closing conference of the linguistics department of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig - Diversity Linguistics: Retrospects and Prospects. (Written about before with much excitement by Hedvig here and here .) The talks were wonderful, presenting results of work done over many years. This is a partial and idiosyncratic summary of my experience there, which has to leave out talks that I couldn't get to due to schedule clashes in the program. They are listed here roughly by chronology, or by theme. You can see the list of all talks and access their abstracts here. A set of photos of the conference is here . Bernard Comrie summarized the achievements of the department over the past seventeen years, probably the main one being the World Atlas of Language Structures first proposed and built by Martin Haspelmath and David Gil. This database set the precedent for linguistic databases tha...