We are pleased to announce the First ELC International Postgraduate Conference on English Linguistics (ELC1), to be held at the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain) between 10-11 May 2008. ELC1 aims to provide linguistics postgraduate students with an opportunity to present and discuss their research in an informal and intellectually stimulating setting.

The conference is organised by postgraduate students from the English Departments of the Universities of Santiago de Compostela and Vigo. It is supported by these two universities and by the English Linguistics Circle, a discussion group involving the following research teams:

1. Variation, Linguistic Change and Grammaticalisation (VLCG; University of Santiago; Director: Prof. Teresa Fanego)
2. Santiago University Learner of English Corpus (SULEC; University of Santiago de Compostela; Director: Dr. Ignacio Palacios-Martínez)
3. Language Variation and Textual Categorisation (LVTC; University of Vigo; Director: Dr. Javier Pérez-Guerra)

Ingo Plag
Professor of English Linguistics
University of Siegen
“Creoles as interlanguages: predictions and implications”

Geoffrey K. Pullum
Professor of General Linguistics
University of Edinburgh
“The discipline where time stood still: Stagnation in the study of English grammar, and what we can do about it”

Antonella Sorace
Professor of Developmental Linguistics
University of Edinburgh
“Variation and instability in bilingual speakers: seeing the forest and the trees”