Dear colleagues, 
I have been asked to forward this message to the list (the same information 
is given below and in the attachment)about a research project and an 
invitation to participate in the XV ALFAL International Congress, to be 
held in Montevideo, Uruguay, 2008.
Please contact Cristine Altman with any queries: [log in to unmask]
Best wishes,
Nicola


LINGUISTIC DOCUMENTATION AND HISTORY
ANNOUNCEMENT OF PROJECT OF INVESTIGATION

1. 	Lines of research 
The Latin American Committee in Linguistic Historiography was established 
at the XIIIth International Congress of the Associação Latino Americana de 
Letras e Lingüística (ALFAL) held in Costa Rica in 2002, with the main 
objective of bringing together researchers — Lusitanists, Hispanists and 
Americanists — interested in the critical analysis of the Latin American 
research traditions, notably the reflection on the formation of the 
linguistic methods in the treatment of linguistic diversity as well as 
language universality. 
The core of the committee consisted of members of regional groups already 
integrated, like those of the ANPOLL Linguistic Historiography Workshop 
(National Association of Graduate Research in Languages and Linguistics), 
of the Center of Documentation in Linguistic Historiography of the 
University of São Paulo (CEDOCH-DL/USP), of the Group of Studies in 
Portuguese Language Historiography from the Pontifical Catholic University 
of São Paulo, those of the Oslo Project on Missionary Linguistics 
(OSPROMIL) and those from others European and American institutions who 
interacted with these groups. 
Three main lines of research were pursued by the researchers of the 
committee who, between 2002 and 2005, developed their projects in a 
integrated way and presented their partial results in the XIV ALFAL 
International Congress in Monterrey, México: the treatment of linguistic 
diversity; missionary linguistics and Portuguese grammaticography. 

2. 	Project in course: Linguistic Documentation and History 
In 2006, researchers from the University of Amsterdam and from the Centro 
de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores em Antropologia Social (CIESAS) in 
Mexico City, developing the Revitalizing Old Linguistic Documentation 
project, and researchers from the Center of Documentation in Linguistic 
Historiography of the University of São Paulo (CEDOCH/USP), working on the 
Documenta Grammaticae et Historiae project, joined forces, motivated by 
their common interest in revisiting, restoring and preserving the 
documentation about the American Indian languages as well as studying the 
Portuguese and the Spanish spoken in the Americas. 
As a result of these efforts, in 2008, during the XV ALFAL International 
Congress, to be held in Montevideo, Uruguay, besides the established lines 
of research of the committee, we intend to emphasize the relevance of the 
documentary research concerning American languages. It is our main 
objective exchange experiences with researchers who are developing similar 
projects, or that are able to present results concerning the investigation 
dedicated to 
a) the elaboration of corpora concerning Native American languages, vital 
or endangered, but also dealing with Latin American varieties of Portuguese 
and Spanish; 
b) the edition, re-edition, and recovery of texts (notably grammars, 
dictionaries, glossaries) about these languages; 
c) critical studies of these texts (keeping in mind ways of grammar 
construction, descriptive techniques, the treatment of metalanguage, and  
the like). 

3. 	Contact address and deadline of submission
Those interested in joining us are invited to make contact with undersigned 
by sending the subject of the work and abstract describing the main lines 
of the research (max. 300 words), and their institutional addresses no 
later than February 29, 2008.


Coordinator: Professor Dr Cristina Altman
Center of Documentation in Linguistic Historiography 
Department of Linguistics 
University of São Paulo
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