Discussions on Legacy Materials 3 (DiLegMa 3)

16-17 avril 2026. Paris, Institut d’Études Avancées. 17 quai d’Anjou, 75004.

Site de l’événement : lien
Enregistrement au colloque :  Please register by April 13th at the latest using this form. Because of the heritage status of the Hotel de Lauzun, it will not be possible to gain access to the building without having registered.

For any questions, please contact Aimée Lahaussois (@cnrs.fr).

Programme : lien
Résumés : lien

Présentation :

Cet événement a reçu le soutien de l’appel à projets Animations Scientifique de la faculté Sociétés & Humanités d’Université Paris Cité, de l’inIndex Empirical Foundations of Linguistics et de l’Institut des études avancées de Paris.

This conference has received financial support from Université Paris Cité’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, from the Empirical Foundations of Linguistics project, and from the Paris Institute for Advanced Studies.

This conference is the third of the DiLegMa series, after editions hosted in Paris in 2024 and in Bern in 2025. The conference aims to bring together descriptive/documentary linguists who engage with legacy materials on their language (or language group) of specialization. Hosted by Université Paris Cité’s Histoire des théories linguistiques research group, the conference will provide opportunities for exchange between historians of linguistics, field linguists and linguists working with endangered languages, and its themes are therefore situated at the interface of these subdisciplines of linguistics.

For linguists involved in language description and documentation, the multiple crises of the last few years have in some cases made access to field sites difficult. This has often led to a renewed interest in exploring earlier descriptive materials— Legacy Materials—as objects of study in their own right, and/or to complement field data collected in person. Legacy materials frequently pose interpretational challenges for present-day linguists. Some reasons for possible difficulties in retrieving and/or reconstructing the original intent and context of the materials may include the following: incomplete or missing metadata; unfamiliar terminology, ontological systems, frameworks; challenging presentation styles and typographies.

Notwithstanding the difficulties in accessing and engaging with them, these materials can often be treasure troves of insights about the people and times which produced them, and contribute in a tangible way to our understanding of earlier practices around collecting and producing linguistic data. Additionally, Legacy Materials may contain data which can provide insights for diachronic work; otherwise inaccessible lexical data; textual materials in registers or genres missing from the contemporary corpus; morphological data necessary to complete paradigms. At the meta-grammaticographical level, these resources can possibly inform us about, among other things, earlier data collection methodology, the development of data annotation and glossing practices, the evolution of grammatical categories and their interrelations, approaches to language description, and the changing role of the various subfields of linguistics in descriptive work, among others.