The 7th meeting of the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE 7)

Welcome to the website for ISLE 7!

ISLE 7 will take place Monday 19 June to Friday 23 June 2023, as a hybrid conference with the onsite conference taking place on the St. Lucia Campus of the University of Queensland in Australia.

ISLE 7 will be hosted by the University of Queensland School of Languages and Cultures.

The conference theme for ISLE 7 is 'Combining Tradition and Computation'.

Please note: Presenters must be ISLE members. 

Important dates

Register now

Presenters must be an ISLE member and register by 1 May 2023.

Become an ISLE member

Pre-recorded presentation files: 17 May 2023

Consent form signed: 17 May 2023

Registration closes: 1 June 2023

Accepted Workshops

Please find below the list of accepted workshops:

• The Combination of Tradition and Computation in the Study of Scottish Historical Correspondence (half-day panel discussion); Convenors: Marina Dossena & Christine Elsweiler
• Challenges and New Directions in English Corpus Linguistics in Australia (full-day workshop); Convenors: Monika Bednarek, Peter Crosthwaite, & Martin Schweinberger
• Female childhoods. Linguistic approaches to the silent and obscure years of women in English (auto-) biographical discourse, 1750-1900 (panel discussion); Convenor: Paloma Tejada Caller
• “People’s poetry”, “dustbin language” and everywhere in between  — the ins and outs of English slanguage  (full-day workshop); Convenors: Kate Burridge  & Howie Manns
• Lexical Variation within World Englishes (half-day workshop); Convenors: Pam Peters

The University of Queensland, School of Languages and Cultures announces

The 7th Meeting of the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE7)

19-23 June 2023

Hybrid Conference (Online & In-person)

Conference Convenors:

Dr Martin Schweinberger (The University of Queensland, Australia)
Prof Michael Haugh (The University of Queensland, Australia)
Prof Kate Burridge (Monash University, Australia)
Hybrid Conference (Online & In-person)

Call for Papers

Download here

The 7th Meeting of the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE7) will be held 19-23 June 2023 as a hybrid conference at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, with the conference theme “Combining Tradition and Computation”. The main aim of ISLE7 is to bring together researchers from around the world who share an interest in the study of the English language and English linguistics.

We invite abstracts for the following types of presentations:

1. Workshops and Panels (including discussion panels)
2. On-site paper presentations (including work-in-progress reports and software demos)
3. Recorded paper presentations (including work-in- progress reports and software demos)
4. Lightning talks: 5-minute video clips or 5-minute on-site lightning talks to present a study, a research project or infrastructure, or research related ideas

Workshops and Panels

Workshop and panels will be scheduled for June 19, 2023 and workshop and panel organisers need to submit their proposal (max. 600 words) including timeline until September 30, 2022. Workshop and panel proposals need to be submitted directly to the ISLE7 organizers via isle7@uq.edu.au. The proposals need to include a description of the workshop or panel, the organizers of the workshop or panel, a timeline, and at least one contact email.

Panel and workshop contributors need to submit their abstracts via the submission system at the same time as abstracts for the regular papers are due but they will need to indicate that the contribution is intended for a workshop or panel when they submit their abstract (this is a dropdown option when submitting the abstract via EasyAbs). 

If a submission is intended for a workshop, please add the short title of the workshop to the title of the contribution (if the paper is about passive alternation and the contribution is intended for a workshop on World Englishes, the title could, e.g., be “Passive alternation across varieties of English (World Englishes)”. Both panels and workshops can also contain panel discussions. The full workshop/panel programs need to be submitted to the conference organizers by the workshop/panel organizers by February 2023. 

Workshop/panel organizers will automatically be signed up for reviewing abstracts.

Submission information

Abstracts for individual papers (max. 400 words) including on-site full and work-in-progress papers, or recorded full and work-in-progress papers, need to be submitted by November 31, 2022. 

Abstracts for lightning talks only need a title and a short (one or two sentence) explanation and also need to be submitted by December 15, 2022.

Submissions need to indicate their preference (full-paper vs work-in-progress vs lighting talk vs
workshop/ panel contribution, on-site vs off-site).

A note of acceptance will be sent out in early March 2023.

Please note

- Presenters must be ISLE Members
- No one can be presenting as first author more than twice

Abstract submission

Please submit your abstract via EasyAbs: http://linguistlist.org/easyabs/isle7

Important dates
Call for papers (published on the conference website https://languages-cultures.uq.edu.au/isle7)

Note of acceptance

Submission of offsite presentations

Contact details

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at isle7@uq.edu.au. Visit the website (https://languages-cultures.uq.edu.au/isle7) for more detailed information, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter (@isle7uq)!

We are looking forward to seeing you in Brisbane in June – be it physically or digitally!

ISLE 7 organising team

Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky 

University of South Australia

Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of South Australia (UniSA) and Director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory within the Australian Research Centre for Interactive and Virtual Environments (IVE). Ina joined UniSA in 2014 from the University of Marburg, Germany. Prior to her appointment as Professor of Neurolinguistics in Marburg, she headed the Max Planck Research Group "Neurotypology" at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany.

Ina is passionate about understanding how the human brain processes language – an interest that she first developed due to her bilingual upbringing, after having moved to Australia from Germany at the age of 7. She has championed the perspective that, in order to truly understand how the human brain processes language, we need to take into account the full diversity of the world's 7000 languages. Her research is further inspired by the recognition that language – like all human cognitive abilities – is deeply rooted in neurobiology and basic mechanisms of information processing in the brain.

With a prolific research program reflected in over 90 publications in refereed international journals, over 20 book chapters and 4 monographs / edited volumes, Ina has won more than AU$4 million in competitive grant funding, including an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship. Her research has been honoured with several prizes, including the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize (awarded by the German Research Foundation and German Federal Ministry of Education and Research), the most prestigious scientific prize for young researchers in Germany.

Jonathan Culpeper 

Lancaster University

Jonathan Culpeper is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Lancaster University, UK. His research spans pragmatics, stylistics and the history of English, all of which he has pursued at some point through corpus methods.

His major publications include Early Modern English Dialogues: Spoken Interaction as Writing (2010, CUP; with Merja Kytö), Pragmatics and the English Language (2014; with Michael Haugh), and English Language: Description, Variation and Context (2018; lead editor).

He is currently leading the corpus-based the £1 million AHRC-funded Encyclopedia of Shakespeare's Language project, which will provide evidence-based and contextualised accounts of Shakespeare's language.

Stefan Gries

University of California

Stefan Th. Gries is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), as well as Honorary Liebig-Professor and Chair of English Linguistics (Corpus Linguistics with a focus on quantitative methods) at the Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen.

He was a visiting professor at the 2007, 2011, 2013, 2015, and 2019 LSA Linguistic Institutes at Stanford University, the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, the University of Chicago, and the University of California, Davis; he was also a Visiting Chair (2013-2017) of the Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science at Lancaster University and the Leibniz Professor (spring semester 2017) at the Research Academy Leipzig of the Leipzig University.

He is a quantitative corpus linguist at the intersection of corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and computational linguistics and has applied a variety of different statistical methods to investigate a wide range of linguistic topics; much of his work involves the open-source software R. Gries has produced more than 200 publications (articles, chapters, books, and edited volumes) and he is an active member of more than a dozen editorial boards as well as academic societies.

Jennifer Hay

University of Canterbury

Jen Hay is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Canterbury, Director of the New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain and Behaviour, and an Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. 

She has broad research interests spanning New Zealand English, Sociophonetics, Laboratory Phonology, and Lexical Representation, and she has published widely in these areas.

Brian Joseph

Ohio State University

Brian has been at OSU since 1979, after receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1978 and spending a year as a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta.

His interests are quite broad, but are focused first and foremost on the study of language change, especially in regard to the Greek language throughout all of its historical phases, from Mycenaean up through Modern Greek, including its prehistory and how it fits into the Indo-European language family and also its more recent significant contact with its neighboring languages in the Balkans. But Brian's interests run also to other languages, especially Sanskrit and Albanian, and to other areas within linguistics, including both morphological theory and the embedding of language into social structures.

More recently, he has been working on issues of language sustainability, looking both at what has gone into making the Greek language relatively robust in its diasporic setting in southern Albania and at what we can determine about linguistic -- and concomitantly ethnic -- viability in ancient times in the eastern Mediterranean.

Catherine Travis

The Australian National University

Catherine Travis is Professor of Modern European Languages in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at the ANU, and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, and in the Language Data Commons – Australia project.

Her research addresses questions related to linguistic and social factors impacting on language variation and change, in particular in socially diverse communities. 

She has conducted large-scale projects applying quantitative methods to the study of spontaneous speech data from English and Spanish, and in monolingual and bilingual communities. Most recently, she has been undertaking a longitudinal project examining Australian English as spoken by ethnically diverse communities across Sydney (Sydney Speaks).

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International flights from Brisbane

The city of Brisbane delivers a first-class travel and transport network making it an easy and cost effective choice for conference delegates.

Easily accessible, Brisbane is serviced by one of Australia's fastest growing airports with a network of direct flights from 31 international and 50 domestic destinations. As the closest eastern seaboard capital city to Asia, Brisbane offers frequent flights to various Asia Pacific destinations and is a transfer hub from major European destinations. Direct flights arrive several times a day from Asia, the United States, New Zealand, the Pacific and the Middle East.

Brisbane International Airport boasts an extensive network of direct flights to international destinations including but not limited to: 

• Singapore
• Hong Kong                                                                                                  
• Bangkok 
• Shanghai 
• Auckland 
• Dubai 
• Los Angeles
• Vancouver

This allows easy access for international delegates to travel home. 

Brisbane city remains compact and well connected, allowing delegates to easily travel between venues, hotels, parklands, cultural attractions, entertainment precincts and dining locations.

The University of Queensland

Located just seven kilometres from Brisbane's city centre (accessible by car or public transport), UQ St Lucia is renowned as one of Australia's most attractive university campuses.

UQ St Lucia Campus

Getting to UQ's St Lucia Campus