Cedric Boeckx and Aritz Irurtzun (CNRS-IKER, and external collaborator of the Barcelona Biolinguistics Initiative) are delighted to announce a summer course on learnability and language variation in San Sebastian, to take place at the palace of Miramar, on June 25-26, 2012. (Some readers of this blog may remember recent biolinguistics-related events hosted in Miramar, such as the Basque encounter with Noam Chomsky in 2006 or the 2010 meeting revolving around Bever's seminal 1970 paper).
Learnability used to be at the forefront of research in generative grammar in the early 1980s, but we feel that after two decades in the background, learnability ought to make a come back, and generative grammarians ought to take advantage of findings in other linguistic traditions to rethink "Plato's problem" in a broader biolinguistic context.
To encourage students to participate, we will offer them the possibility of making a poster presentation on any aspect of learnability and language variation that they are working on. Details about this poster session will be posted in the near future.
We look forward to seeing you there.
