The Second ELC International Postgraduate Conference on English Linguistics (ELC2) was held at the University of Vigo (Spain) on 30-31 October 2009. The objective of the conference was to provide linguistics postgraduate students with an opportunity to present and discuss their research in an informal and intellectually stimulating setting.
The conference was organised by postgraduate students from the English Departments of the Universities of Vigo and Santiago de Compostela. It was supported by these two universities and by the English Linguistics Circle, a research network involving the following research teams:
- Variation, Linguistic Change and Grammaticalisation (VLCG; University of Santiago de Compostela; Director: Prof. Teresa Fanego)
- Spoken English Research Team at the University of Santiago de Compostela (SPERTUS; University of Santiago de Compostela; Director: Ignacio Palacios Martínez)
- Language Variation and Textual Categorisation (LVTC; University of Vigo; Director: Javier Pérez Guerra)
- Methods and Materials for the Teaching and Acquisition of Foreign Languages (MMTAFL, University of Vigo; Director: Marta Dahlgren-Thorsell)
ELC2 was honoured to receive three internationally recognised plenary speakers: Terence Odlin, from Ohio State University, Geoff Thompson, from the University of Liverpool, and María José López-Couso, from the University of Santiago de Compostela.
The conference delegates came from many different universities, located both in Spain and elsewhere. There were speakers from the Spanish universities of Santiago de Compostela, Vigo, Seville, Pablo de Olavide in Seville, and the Balearic Islands; the international universities were represented by Hong Kong, Poitiers, Bamberg, Freiburg, Essex, the University of Maria Curie-Skłodowska in Lublin and the American universities of Michigan at Ann Arbor and Louisiana at Lafayette. The various papers covered a wide range of topics: morphology, syntax, phonetics, lexis, semantics, pragmatics, Discourse Analysis, Second Language Acquisition, and many others.
The English Linguistics Circle was also responsible for ELC1, a former edition of the International Postgraduate Conference on English Linguistics held in Santiago de Compostela in May 2008. A refereed volume containing a selection of the papers presented at ELC1 will be published as New trends and methodologies in applied English language research. Diachronic, diatopic and contrastive studies (Linguistic Insights Series; Bern: Peter Lang).
