Ad Backus is a current FRIAS fellow, and will be here until Christmas. His work is on language contact issues, particularly contact-induced change and codeswitching, and various general linguistic issues (such as multiword units) studied from a usage-based theoretical perspective. Several of his graduate students from his home base, Tilburg University in Holland, will be coming to the DGKL conference in Freiburg (10-12 Oct.) and stay on for a few days after that.

Together with Nikolay Khakimov and these students, he will organize a little workshop. The idea is to spend a half day each on their projects, discussing issues such as design of the study, conceptual issues raised in recent literature, and analyses of data samples, possibly also reserving some time for writing.

The Tilburg graduate students work on contact-induced change in subordination structures in Dutch Turkish (Pelin Onar Valk, about half way), on individual variation in the use of multiword units and its implications for cognitive sociolinguistics (using both corpus linguistics and experimental psycholinguistic studies; Veronique Verhagen, one year in), and on a computational usage-based model of Second Language Acquisition (Yevgen Matusevych, just started). Nikolay, of course, works on frequency issues in Russian-German codeswitching.

There are still slots for presenting your own works. Please let either Ad Backus or Nikolay Khakimov know whether you want to join the workshop, and if so, whether you would like to claim a ‘slot’. People will be working in groups of two or three most of the time, with people also going off to do some work on their own or with someone else for part of the time.