The joint meeting of the 26th Annual Conference of International Association of Chinese Linguistics (IACL-26) and the 20th International Conference on Chinese Language and Culture (ICCLC-20) was held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on May 4 (Friday) – 6 (Sunday), 2018.
Co-organized by the Department of Asian Languages & Cultures and the Center for East Asian Studies and co-sponsored by Language Institute, World Language Education Program, and Chinese Language and Culture Club (CLACC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, this joint conference is one of the largest Chinese linguistics conferences held outside of China. The organizing committee received a total of more than 500 submissions of papers and abstracts, which was an increase of 11% compared with that of IACL-25 held in Budapest, Hungary last year. The IACL-26 organizing committee by working with IACL formed the Scientific Committee with 52 scholars, invited 93 scholars worldwide in the reviewing of all the submitted papers and abstracts, and sent all the submissions out for anonymous review after January 10. The review process was finished on February 26 with the notifications of acceptance to IACL-26 and ICCLC-20 announced and sent to the authors. More than 240 scholars from all over the world, including but not limited to, Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, United States, United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, France, Hungary, Australia, Singapore, Italy, and Vietnam, attended the conference and presented over 230 papers on various subfields of Chinese linguistics, including syntax, semantics, phonology, phonetics, historical linguistics, morphology, pragmatics, language acquisition, cognitive and functional linguistics, sign linguistics, and many other subcategories.
At the opening ceremony of IACL-26/ICCLC-20, Vice Provost & Dean of International Division Professor Guido Podestá made a warm welcome remark on behalf of Chancellor Rebecca Blank to the over 270 participants gathering at the Great Hall of Memorial Union.
IACL-26 invited 9 keynote speakers and 21 invited speakers. The keynote speeches were given by Professors William Baxter from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Ping Chen from the University of Queensland (Australia), C.-T. James Huang from Harvard University, Richard Larson from SUNY-Stony Brook, Chinfa Lien from National Tsing Hua University, Danqing Liu from Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Haihua Pan from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Alain Peyraube from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France, and Irene Vogel from the University of Delaware.
In conjunction with the IACL annual conference, the Young Scholar Award (YSA) competition is held once a year to promote, recognize, and encourage young scholars. This year, there were 69 paper submissions for the YSA competition, the largest volume of submissions since this award was first established. Three finalists were selected for the final competition, who were awarded a travel subsidy and invited to IACL-26 to give an oral presentation at a special session on May 4, organized for this purpose, before a panel of judges chaired by the IACL president. After intense competition, Dr. Mengmeng Yang from Chinese Academy of Social Sciences won the competition and was awarded the Young Scholar Award.
On May 5, IACL-26 held the IACL membership meeting and announced the voting result for a new Vice President and seven new Executive Committee members. Professor Hongming Zhang from the University of Wisconsin-Madison was elected new Vice President of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics. According to the IACL Constitution, current Vice President, Professor Danqing Liu from Chinese Academy of Social Sciences will serve as the President for Year 2018-2019 after IACL-26, and Professor Hongming Zhang will serve as the President for Year 2019-2020 after IACL-27.
The annual meeting of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics is an international conference, which has been held at various prestigious institutions of Asia, Europe, Australia, and North America over the past 20 plus years. It has become a major conference for scholars and students around the world working on various aspects of Chinese linguistics and related studies. The International Conference on Chinese Language and Culture (ICCLC) is an international meeting, which was initiated by Hanyang University (Seoul, South Korea) and co-organized by more than ten universities in the Asia-Pacific region. The ICCLC aims to promote the study of Chinese language & culture and strengthen academic communication among scholars in the fields. The 27th Annual Conference of International Association of Chinese Linguistics (IACL-27) and the 21st International Conference on Chinese Language and Culture (ICCLC-21) will be held at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies in Japan, and Beijing Normal University in China, respectively in 2019.