The South Caucasian Chalk Circle

This workshop will bring together linguists working on different aspects of the scientific study of language and experts in Georgian and South Caucasian (Kartvelian) languages. Its primary goal is to promote a dialogue between scholars from different approaches, established scholars, as well as graduate students and young scholars at the beginning of their career. The timing of this workshop coincides with the Shota Rustaveli year, commemorating the greatest poet and thinker known as the Homer of the Caucasus.

Georgian and the small language family to which it belongs (Laz, Mingrelian, and Svan) manifest a dazzling array of unusual linguistic characteristics and are associated with a strong philological tradition in Georgia itself.  Scholars who do not read Georgian or Russian may be familiar with some aspects of these languages thanks to the work of a number of Western scholars. However, given the many research questions and theoretical challenges they have raised, the languages in the Kartvelian family deserve more attention from scholars, and could be explored in greater detail by an international team that would bring together specialists versed in the Georgian philological tradition and general linguists working on phonology, syntax, language acquisition, language variation, and sentence processing. This workshop is part of the bilateral effort to create closer ties between two research communities invested in the study of individual Kartvelian languages or comparative Kartvelian.

The main goal of the workshop is to create a research community of scholars working on Kartvelian languages, which is reflected in the format of the workshop.

Thursday, September 22

9:30-10:00 Official opening (all panels together): Lenore Grenoble (U of Chicago), Léa Nash, Ioana Chitoran, and Hélène Gerardin (Paris organizers)

10:00-10:45 General introduction (all panels together): Maria Polinsky

10:45-11:00 Break

11:00-13:00 Tutorial 1: Georgian grammar and formal models (Yakov Testelets, Moscow State U)

13:00-14:00 Lunch

14:00-15:00 Tutorial 2: Kartvelian research in Georgia: Current state of affairs (Rusudan Asatiani, Tbilisi State U)

15:00-15:15 Break

15:15-17:00 Phonetics/Phonology posters (9); each presenter will have two minutes to give a short summary of their poster, then posters go on display

17:00-19:00 Panels, Meeting 1

Friday, September 23

9:00-11:00 Tutorial 3: Experimental work on language (Maria Polinsky and Stavros Skopeteas, U of Maryland and U of Bielefeld)

11:00-11:15 Break

11:15-13:00 Morphosyntax Posters (14); each presenter will have two minutes to give a short summary of their poster, then posters go on display

13:00-14:00 Lunch

14:00-15:00 Tutorial 4: Terminological session (Léa Nash, Daniel Harbour, and Martha McGinnis, U Paris-8, Queen Mary University London, U of Victoria)

15:00-15:15 Break

15:15-18:30 Panels, Meeting 2

Saturday, September 24

9:00-10:30 Tutorial 5: Documentary linguistics (Lenore Grenoble, U of Chicago)

10:30-10:45 Break

10:45-12:30 Tutorial 6: Georgian corpora from a computational and comparative perspective (Aric Bills, CASL at U of Maryland)

12:30-13:30 Lunch

13:30-14:30  Posters on variation, acquisition, historical linguistics (7); each presenter will have two minutes to give a short summary of their poster, then posters are on display

14:30-16:30  Panels, Meeting 3

16:30-16:45 Break

16:45-19:00 All participants together; panel chairs (or chosen panel participants) present their main results to the entire group. Planning future meetings.

19:00   Conference closing