Morphosyntactic Variation and Change in the Twenty-First Century (MVC21) will be held online from 13.00–17.00 GMT (14.00–18.00 CET, 9.00–13.00 EDT) on 17 and 18 March 2021.

The conference is part of the project ‘Tweetolectology: Investigating the diffusion of morphosyntactic innovations using social media’ (Economic and Social Research Council), a collaboration between the Universities of Oxford (David Willis), Cambridge (Tamsin Blaxter, Deepthi Gopal) and Bern (Adrian Leemann). The study of morphosyntactic variation and change is currently entering an exciting stage in its evolution where sociolinguistic, formal and big-data approaches are able to inform each other in insightful ways. For instance, big data allows more robust testing of hypotheses developed using the other approaches than traditional small-scale studies. An understanding of social and geographic context allows formal approaches to tease apart phenomena which might otherwise be opaque. Formal approaches make links across phenomena that might otherwise be catalogued separately. The aim of this conference is to bring together researchers working on ongoing variation and change using one or more of these approaches. We aim to further the dialogue between them in order to help reach a full understanding of the processes which guide morphosyntactic variation and change.

Invited speakers: Suzanne Evans Wagner (Michigan State University), Øystein Vangsnes (UiT The Arctic University of Norway), Jim Wood (Yale).

The full programme is at http://tweetolectology.com/mvc21/programme.html.

All participants must register via the link above the programme by 12 March 2021. The conference will be held using the Gathertown platform (https://gather.town/). A link will be sent to all registered participants in the week of the conference.