Marc
van Oostendorp
Most
phonologists would hopefully agree that we are witnessing interesting times in
our field. There are many interesting debates,
occasionally even on the fundaments of our discipline, and there is a lot
of interaction with phoneticians, psycholinguists, and other students of sound
structure.
Yet
even within such a blossoming discipline, we need a good infrastructure of
places where people can meet and exchange their ideas. Within Europe, we have
quite a number of specialised workshops, and also a few conferences with a more
general scope, such as the Manchester Phonology Meeting, and the GLOW
Conferences.
Until
a few years ago, the Holland Institute of Linguistics Phonology Conferences
(HILP) were an important part of this infrastructure: one of the very few
general conferences on phonology in Europe. The question now is, given the fact
that the Holland Institute of Linguistics no longer exists, how can we guarantee
the survival of the conferences it sponsored?
After
having talked to quite a number of European phonologists, I now think the best
solution would be the following. We need a group of maybe four or five
departments across the continent which would agree to organize an Old-world
Conference on Phonology (if we agree that this is what its name is) every once
in a while. If the OCP would be a biannual conference, just like HILP and the
North American Conference on Phonology (and I suggest we would alternate with
the latter), this would mean that every group would have to organize an OCP
every eight or ten years.
This
will basically be my proposal during the 'business meeting' of the first OCP.
One of the questions that still has to be answered is, what the relation of the
OCP series would be to the other phonology conferences in Europe. Here, I want
to say a few words about GLOW, because I am a member of the GLOW Board.
Phonologists
are very sceptical about the GLOW Conferences, and they have good reasons for
this. The most important problem is that GLOW is seen as a syntax conference,
and at present, phonologists seem to generally cooperate more fruitfully with
e.g. phoneticians than with syntacticians. Inversely, syntacticians also do not
seem overly interested in our work. Therefore we have for quite a long time seen
that in an average GLOW Conference there were only two or three phonology
presentations, and each of these was attended by nine or ten people.
Although
the GLOW Conference in Amsterdam last year in my opinion showed that things
could be different, and also the programme for Lund this year promises to be
quite interesting, I am convinced that because of the general feeling among
phonologists, GLOW could never really fulfill the role of HILP/OCP. The two
things should be independent. Maybe it would be a good idea for GLOW to be a
platform for those types of phonology that seem to combine most fruitfully with
syntactic research. This year we have a workshop on intonation, for instance.
Yet
GLOW is not just a conference, it also is an association. In my view it is good
to have an association of theoretically inclined researchers in our field, and
it might even be fruitful to cooperate with our syntactic colleagues from the
point of view of organizational continuity, etc. I therefore propose to link OCP
to the GLOW Association — perhaps in some very loose way (e.g. like there also
is an 'Asian GLOW', about which the GLOW Board does not necessarily have
anything to say.