The Australian Linguistics Institute is now open for online registration [finally - oh the pain of making a rego page that's secure AND university-compliant, tax-compliant, human-compliant...]. Short, intensive courses will be presented by some excellent linguists from 7th - 11th July 2008, at the University of Sydney. It is a great opportunity for linguists, language professionals, graduate students and advanced undergraduates to learn more about a wide range of topics in language. Plus there's to be a three day Indigenous Languages Institute sponsored by the Koori Centre which will bring heaps of Indigenous people working on languages together to work on problems of language maintenance and language revitalisation.
Participants may register for up to four courses during the week-long ALI. Each course is offered for 1.5 hours each day for five days. Topics include psycholinguistics (Anne Cutler), first language acquisition (Rosalind Thornton and Stephen Crain), morpho-syntax (Brett Baker, Greville Corbett, Mark Harvey, Rachel Nordlinger, Gert Webelhuth and Regine Eckhardt), computational linguistics (Robert Dale, Mary Dalrymple, Mark Dras), Japanese grammar (Nerida Jarkey and Harumi Minagawa), sociolinguistics (Jennifer Hay, Michael Clyne, Diana Eades), semantics (Bert Peeters, Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka), discourse and conversational analysis (Celia Kitzinger, Jim Martin, Sigrid Norris), sign language linguistics and grammaticalisation (Louise de Beuzeville and Trevor Johnston), contact language typology (Ian Smith), quantitative methods (Carsten Roever) and educational linguistics (William Armour, Ryuko Kubota, Ahmar Mahboob, Aek Phakiti).
Do book your accommodation early, as the combination of World Youth Day and the Pope's visit the following week mean that accommodation may be taken up.
ALI follows on several other conferences to be held at the University of Sydney, forming Lingfest 2008 (30 June - 11 July 2008) They include the annual conferences of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association, the International Lexical-Functional Grammar Association, the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia, and the Australian Linguistics Society, as well as other workshops on topics ranging from Japanese syntax and second language acquisition, to Papuan languages (28-29 June 2008, separate registration) and instrumentals (3rd July, separate registration). LingFest will be followed by the Pre ISFC Institute at the University of NSW (14 - 18 July), and then the International Systemic Functional Congress at Macquarie University (21 - 25 July).
ALI is sponsored by ALS, ALAA, HCSNet, and RIHSS, as well as participating Universities, and staff of the NSW Department of Education and Training.