Session 2

This session is dedicated to boundaries of linguistic areas and socio-cultural interaction. It focuses on factors that play a role in shaping external and internal boundaries of linguistic areas. Determining the boundaries of linguistic areas is a notoriously difficult task. The main reason for this is that linguistic areas are complex multi-faceted constructs. For instance, areas with shared linguistic features are not necessarily congruent with climate zones or areas with shared socio-cultural values. At the level of interpersonal interaction, intergroup attitudes can override the general tendency of interlocutors to converge in conversation and therefore contribute to the maintenance of boundaries. We explicitly encourage a multi-disciplinary dialogue, in order to increase our understanding of the interaction between linguistic, socio-cultural, and ecological factors that may impede contact between speakers of different languages or language varieties and therefore contribute to shaping the boundaries of linguistic areas.

11:30 - 12:00 
Stefanie Siebenhuetter:
Conceptual transfer of spatial reference due to language contact?
A semantic approach to cultural conceptualization in the linguistic area Mainland Southeast Asia

14:00 - 14:30
Sarah Grossenbacher et al: 
Smartphone app methodologies for regional dialectology: the English North-South divide in data from the English Dialects App

14:30 - 15:00
Daan Hovens:
What is the language of the euregio rhine-meuse-north? Euroregional integration and the future of languages near the Dutch-German border

15:00 - 15:30
Maja Miličević, Nikola Ljubešić and Tanja Samardžić: 
Establishing borders between states vs languages: Twitter data to the rescue

16:00 - 16:30
Arjen Versloot:
Isolation and archaisms: a GIS-case study on Alemannic dialects of Wallis and northern Italy

16:30 - 17:00
Balthasar Bickel and Curdin Derungs​: 
Linguistic areas bottom-up