Explaining Individual Lifespan Change

The EILisCh project will focus on linguistic variation and change in Icelandic syntax and it will be the most ambitious attempt so far to model, understand, and explain Individual Lifespan Change in linguistic behavior, drawing on recent advances in sociolinguistics, quantitative syntactic theory, clinicial linguistics, as well as resources recently made available by Language Technology. The project will harness these ingredients and the experience of the PI and the infrastructure present in his Language and Technology lab in order to facilitate a new kind of a large scale project that will yield substantial progress towards important empirical, theoretical, and methodological goals, as well as benefits for society. I will track hundreds of Members of Parliament via their speeches over their entire political career and interview dozens of current and former MPs to establish an even deeper profile of how they use language. Carrying this research out in Iceland is important because of the unusually easy access that researchers have to public figures in this small language community. The kind of precise modelling that I describe in this proposal is only possible in a project that builds on substantial pre-existing Language Resources and takes place in a setting where extensive knowledge of the linguistic data and the required technological tools is present. My Language and Technology lab at the University of Iceland is the right place to do this and the experience I have gathered in several previous projects will be essential for my team’s success. However, the scale of this enterprise is beyond the means of national funding agencies in Iceland; thus I turn to the ERC, so that together we can redefine the state of the art in the study of Individual Lifespan Change.