En: Call for papers - Pre-ALT workshop

Thu Feb 8 15:47:42 UTC 2007

--- Nikolaus Himmelmann <himmelma at linguistics.rub.de>
escreveu:

> Data: Sun, 07 Jan 2007 21:12:11 +0100
> De: Nikolaus Himmelmann
> <himmelma at linguistics.rub.de>
> Para: dobeslist <dobeslist at mpi.nl>
> Assunto: Call for papers - Pre-ALT workshop
> 
> Hi
> 
> here is another call for papers, not for the DoBeS
> workshop but for a 
> workshop which will precede VIIth biannual meeting
> of the Association 
> for Linguistic Typology in Paris later this year
> (further info on this 
> event at http://www.alt7.cnrs.fr/).
> 
> The workhop will be open to all interested parties,
> and we of course 
> would welcome strong attendance from among the DoBeS
> crowd. Funding, 
> however, will only provided to those who make a
> presentation. Here again 
> we would welcome strong representation of the DoBeS
> crowd but note that 
> no special priority will be given to proposals from
> DoBeS members. 
> Selection will be made solely on the basis of the
> quality and relevance 
> of a given proposal. The selection committee
> consists of the organizers 
> and the invited speakers.
> 
> So we are looking forward to receive high-quality
> proposals from you
> 
> And, somewhat belatedly, wish you all the best for
> 2007
> 
> Nikolaus & Nick
> 
> 
> -------- Original Message --------
> 
> Pre-ALT VII-Workshop Linguistic Typology and
> Language Documentation
> 
> Paris, 24-25 September 2007 (immediately preceding
> the VIIth biannual
> meeting of the Association for Linguistic Typology)
> 
> Organizers: Nikolaus P. Himmelmann (Ruhr-Universität
> Bochum) & Nick
> Evans (University of Melbourne)
> 
> We are now calling for paper proposals for the above
> workshop; details 
> of its overall conception and the focus of
> individual sessions are given 
> below. Seven invited speakers will be presenting –
> as indicated below – 
> and we are envisaging a further one to two
> presentations per session. 
> The time allowed for these presentations is 30
> minutes including 
> discussion. We particularly welcome proposals which
> address the issues 
> raised below with data from actual language
> documentations.
> 
> Applicants should submit a title, abstract of one to
> two pages, and an
> indication of which of the three sessions they wish
> their proposal to be
> considered for.
> 
> Deadline:	15 March 2007 (decisions on acceptance
> will be communicated by
> mid April)
> 
> Further inquiries should be directed to himmelma AT
> linguistics.rub.de
> 
> 1. Goal
> Within linguistics, language typology  – as the
> field concerned with
> understanding and systematizing the world’s
> linguistic diversity – has
> the potential to gain a great deal from the recent
> intensification of
> language documentation work. At the same time,
> because it has a rich and
> subtle picture of what languages can and cannot do
> (as far as we know so
> far!), language typology provides a deep and varied
> perspective on what
> findings in individual language documentation
> projects are exciting and
> unusual, and which are relatively familiar and
> unsurprising. It can thus
> help focus attention on crucial gaps in the data
> gathered by documentary
> linguists.
> The overall goal of this workshop, then, is to
> examine the interactions
> between language typology and linguistic
> documentation, in both
> directions. On the one hand we ask: How do questions
> arising in typology
> inform the practice of language documentation? Can
> typological
> parameters and generalizations be used in evaluating
> the scope and
> quality of a documentation? From the converse
> perspective, questions of
> the following kind arise: How will language
> documentations affect
> research in linguistic typology? Do they have the
> potential to open up
> new avenues of research and challenge standard
> assumptions and practices
> in the field?
> For the purposes of this workshop, a language
> documentation is to be
> understood to refer to a sizable multimedia corpus
> of raw and primary
> data for a little-known language. Raw data are
> recordings of
> communicative events (including recordings of
> elicitation sessions),
> primary data are transcripts of such recordings with
> linguistic and
> ethnographic commentary (including translation) as
> well as field notes.
> Furthermore, it can be assumed to include some type
> of lexical database
> listing all lexical items, also accompanied by
> linguistic and
> ethnographic annotations (meaning explications,
> notes on affixed forms,
> sociolinguistics, etc). While the corpus typically
> will also include
> descriptive observations and generalizations, it
> will not necessarily
> include a comprehensive descriptive grammar.
> We take linguistic typology to be the subfield of
> linguistics concerned
> with developing a body of analytically compatible
> concepts valid across
> all the world's languages and determining the limits
> of crosslinguistic
> variability. It makes use of both induction from
> individual languages
> and deduction from general theoretical principles
> and must integrate the
> vast library of language descriptions in a way that
> renders them at
> least broadly compatible.
> 
> 2. Session topics
> The core of the workshop will consist of 3 half-day
> sessions, each
> focussing on a different point of contact between
> linguistic typology
> and the documentarist enterprise. The three sessions
> have the following
> themes.
> 
> Session 1. On discovering complex linguistic
> structures
> Invited speakers:  Melissa Bowerman, Bert Remijsen
> 
> The structure of most languages is such that crucial
> examples may simply
> fail to appear in a naturalistic corpus of whatever
> size. Examples
> include: complete verb paradigms; tonal paradigms
> for languages with
> floating tones or tone sandhi; complex interactions
> of different
> syntactic rules. Consequently, to produce anything
> like a complete and
> satisfying data base for the description of a
> language, we need to
> employ techniques which focus on nodal points of
> data-gathering –
> traditionally something that has been done by
> ‘structured elicitation’.
> A related issue is that, because different languages
> will pose different
> problems and it may take many years for the linguist
> to understand a
> phenomenon to the point where they realize what all
> the dimensions are
> which need elicitation, the relative timing of
> structure-oriented and
> naturalistic data-gathering can be problematic.
> 
> Contributions to this session would address one or
> more of the following
> three interrelated issues:
> 1)	While it is widely assumed – as we do in the
> preceding paragraph -
> that certain types of crucial examples are missing
> from corpora of
> naturalistic speech, this has never been
> demonstrated in any great
> detail. We thus invite contributions which
> demonstrate missing crucial
> examples with regard to a recently compiled,
> reasonably extensive
> documentary corpus.
> 2)	How do successful field linguists discover the
> presence of new
> structured subsystems and what lines of
> data-gathering do they find most
> effective in understanding how they work?
> 3)	In some areas of cross-linguistic research,
> interesting hybrid
> techniques of generating focussed data sets which
> involve more or less
> naturalistic speech event have developed (such as
> the use of video-clips
> or pictures to stimulate linguistic responses). Are
> these useful for
> documentation projects and should further tools be
> developed along these
> lines?
> 
> Session 2. Naturalistic discourse data in typology
> Invited speakers: Joan Bresnan, Bernhard Waelchli,
> Tony Woodbury
> 
> Until now, language typology has largely taken, as
> the input from which
> cross-linguistic generalizations are induced, clear
> categorical
> descriptions – typically grammars and to a lesser
> extent dictionaries.
> However, there have been a number of recent
> proposals regarding ways
> that typological hypotheses can be constructed from
> and tested against
> the ‘rough naturalistic’ data to be found in more
> naturalistic corpora.
> Some examples:
> 
> (a)	Parallels in the distribution of rare / marginal
> / ‘incorrect’
> constructions and phenomena which are grammatically
> correct and normal,
> but only found in a few languages: here the
> corpus-based and
> grammar-survey based approaches to typology may
> enter into fruitful
> conversation.
> (b)	Are there principled differences in structure
> and complexity between
> more rehearsed oral genres (e.g. ritual speeches) as
> opposed to more
> casual genres which make it potentially interesting
> to carry out
> comparisons between genre-slices of naturalistic
> corpora? For example,
> does it make sense to work on “the typology of
> relative clause
> constructions in conversation” vs “the typology of
> relative clause
> constructions in narratives” before approaching the
> more comprehensive
> topic of “the typology of relative clause
> constructions”?
> (c)	Once we look at larger units of languages, such
> as discourse
> organization, is it still possible to hold
> structures constant across
> languages under comparison and use naturalistic
> data? A traditional
> method of doing this is to compare parallel
> translations of some text
> (the Bible, the Little Prince, or some other
> canonical text), but is it
> possible to develop more flexible ways of doing this
> by matching texts
> by structure and other features?
> 
> Session 3. Explicating meaning: Compositionality and
> cultural presupposition
> Invited speakers: Emmon Bach, Alan Rumsey
> 
> Both documentary linguistics and linguistic typology
> are confronted with
> the fundamental and largely unresolved problem of
> the cross-linguistic
> intercomparability of meanings (of words and
> utterances): How do we know
> that the two expressions given as translation
> equivalents in two
> languages mean “the same” (or, for that matter, “not
> really the same”)?
> Is it possible to separate culturally specific
> implicatures and
> presuppositions from possibly universal meaning
> components? And from a
> more practical point of view: since meaning is
> usually worked out by
> layering commentaries upon commentaries (as with
> interpretive traditions
> of religious texts in many literate cultures), is it
> useful to elicit
> more such ‘real hypertexts’ by seeking (and
> recording) commentaries by
> one speaker on texts of another, and if so, what is
> the best way of
> recording and representing? Are there differences in
> applying this model
> to ‘higher’ genres (e.g. key myths) and ‘lower’ ones
> (e.g. casual
> conversation), and does this interact with cultural
> norms about how far
> one can impute meaning and intention to others?
> 	While the basic issue in principle applies to all
> levels where meaning
> is relevant, this session will focus specifically on
> constructional
> meanings, in particular constructions which have
> played a more prominent
> role in compositional semantics such as
> quantification, negation, focus,
> etc. With regard to these items we ask: How can we
> diagnose
> interlanguage difference and sameness (typological
> perspective)? How can
> we ensure that a documentation includes sufficiently
> detailed and
> explicit commentary with regard to the meaning of
> such constructions
> (documentary perspective)?
> 
> 
> 


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