61st Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society
Short Title: CLS 61

Date: 09-May-2025 - 11-May-2025
Location: Chicago, IL, USA
Contact: Gabriel Gilbert
Contact Email: [email protected]
Meeting URL: http://chicagolinguisticsociety.com

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Pragmatics; Semantics; Sociolinguistics; Syntax

The Chicago Linguistic Society is delighted to announce that the full conference program is now available online. You can view the schedule of plenary talks, parallel sessions, and poster presentations here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JAKow_g9eqwxb0_JoQXKYbDZqFllDO3F/view?usp=sharing
We look forward to welcoming presenters and attendees for what promises to be one of the most exciting CLS conferences yet!

Meeting Description:

The Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS) is the oldest student-run linguistics organization in the United States. This academic year, CLS will host its 61st Annual Meeting (CLS 61), which will be held from Friday, May 9 to Sunday, May 11, 2025. CLS has a longstanding tradition of uniting eminent scholars and researchers from across the globe to exchange their knowledge and expertise within the realm of linguistics at our annual meeting, and particularly celebrate interdisciplinarity and the ample benefits of diverse methodologies at our conference.

Call for Papers:

We invite scholars from any area of linguistic inquiry, including but not limited to syntax, morphology, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, phonology, phonetics, all relevant interfaces and adjacent fields across the cognitive and social sciences. We particularly encourage submissions that relate to this year's special topics:

Sound Change and Adaptation - We welcome submissions exploring the underlying mechanisms, causes, and outcomes of phonological change and phonetic adaptation across languages. This topic seeks to address key questions surrounding the processes by which sound changes occur, focusing on the linguistic, cognitive, and social factors that drive these changes. We particularly encourage abstracts addressing, but not limited to, the following areas: phonetic drivers of sound change, lexical diffusion and gradual sound change, contact-induced sound change, cognitive and neurolinguistic perspectives on sound change.

Interfacial Topics in Sociolinguistics - We invite submissions exploring how insights and frameworks from semantics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, and syntax are used to investigate the relationship between language, identities, and ideologies. We particularly invite abstracts addressing, but not limited to, situational variation and personae construction, the effects of language ideologies on language processing, variation at the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic levels, and the application of variationist research to socio-political questions.

Time, Space, and Deixis - We welcome work examining questions of personal, spatial, and temporal reference as they relate to the verbal complex, to the demonstrative system, and to the grammar as a whole. This topic is dedicated to exploring the linguistic encoding of motion and spatial orientation in relation to deixis, and we invite diverse, interdisciplinary approaches and insights from any and all subfields within linguistics and from related fields. We particularly encourage submissions exploring deictic questions of time, motion, and reference from the position of syntax and its various interfaces, diachronic syntax and semantics, as well as corpus and computational methods.

Manual Modality and Signed Languages - We invite abstracts exploring foundational and emerging questions surrounding the structure, perception, and evolution of sign languages and other manual modality systems. This topic will examine critical areas of linguistic, cognitive, and social research into how manual languages are produced, perceived, and developed over time. By bringing together contemporary research in this area, the topic will highlight both theoretical and empirical perspectives, while addressing the unique attributes of sign languages as well as the processes through which manual modality languages emerge and adapt. We encourage submissions addressing, but not limited to, the following areas: production and perception in manual modality, phonology in sign and gesture, gesture in the context of sign language, sociolinguistics and language rights in manual modality, emergent languages and language change, and language development in manual modality.

Black Languages - We particularly welcome research examining the aforementioned topics as they relate to African and diasporic languages and language users. We seek to showcase the breadth of work investigating Black languages from all linguistic subfields and adjacent fields.

Submission details may be found on our conference website.