Call for papers (SLE): Construction Grammar beyond English

[Yoon, Jiyoung]

Call for Papers

Construction Grammar beyond English: observational and experimental approaches

Workshop at the 44th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea
(Logroño, Spain), 8-11 September 2011



Organizers:                 Jiyoung Yoon (University of North Texas)
 <jiyoung.yoon at unt.edu>
Stefan Th. Gries (University of California, Santa Barbara)
<stgries at linguistics.ucsb.edu>



Deadline:                     12 November 2010 (for provisional abstracts)
Conference site:          <http://sle2011.cilap.es/>


Overview
The notion of constructions, understood as learned form-meaning parings of non-predictable as well as highly frequent predictable linguistic expressions, has introduced a new perspective on language: grammatical knowledge is not viewed as modular, but rather as knowledge of a highly structured and interconnected network of symbolic units, which in turn is viewed as a lexico-semantic continuum, the so-called constructicon (Langacker 1987; Goldberg 1995, 2006). While an increasing number of constructional studies have been adopting the usage-based model of constructions in which it is assumed that grammar is shaped by usage (Goldberg 2006) and children learn a language in a bottom-up fashion (Tomasello 2003), the range of existing studies is narrower than it would ideally be. On the one hand, there is the usual predominance of work on English: with the exception of Fried & Östman (2004) and Croft’s typological work on Radical Construction Grammar (e.g., Croft 2001), there is as yet unsatisfactorily little construction-grammar work on different languages.
            On the other hand, even though Construction Grammarians have been embracing different methodologies and sources of data, there is still a need for more methodologically diverse and comprehensive studies, especially since while all types of data can provide linguistic evidence to a certain degree, there is no single linguistic method that can cover and answer all types of research questions (cf. Arppe et al. 2010).


Objectives
This workshop is intended to bring together empirically-oriented Construction Grammar approaches with the specific aims to (i) advance promote interaction and cross-fertilization between researchers interested in constructional approaches on languages other than English and (ii) further the growing trend towards multi-methodological research and converging evidence from corpora, experimentation, and simulation. Proposals are invited on observational and/or experimental studies on any aspect of constructions. Studies focusing on non-English data as well as cross-linguistic analyses between other languages and English are welcome.


Procedure
Proposals should be in English, and each presentation should be adjusted to a 30-minute slot (20 min. + 10 min. for discussion). Interested colleagues are invited to send an e-mail to Jiyoung Yoon (<jiyoung.yoon at unt.edu>) and Stefan Th. Gries (<stgries at linguistics.ucsb.edu>), with their name, affiliation and a provisional abstract (max. 100 words) before 12 November 2010.


Important dates

‒                    Deadline for submission of provisional abstract (max. 100 words):    12 November 2010

[Please submit in .txt, .rtf, or .doc (not .pdf.)]

‒                    Notification of acceptance for workshop proposals:                           20 December 2010

‒                    Submission of final full abstract (max. 500 words):                            12 January 2011

[Please submit in .txt, .rtf, or .doc. (not .pdf.)].


References
Arppe, A., Gilquin, G., Glynn, D., Hilpert, M., & Zeschel, A. 2010. Cognitive Corpus Linguistics: five points of debate on current theory and methodology. Corpora 5(1). 1-27.
Croft, W. 2001. Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fried, Mirjam & Jan-Ola Östman (eds.). 2004. Construction Grammar in a Cross-Language Perspective. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Goldberg, A.E. 1995. Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Goldberg, A.E. 2006. Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gonzálvez-García, F. & Butler, C. 2006. Mapping functional-cognitive space. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 4. 39-96.
Langacker, R.W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. 1: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Tomasello, M. 2003. Constructing a Language: A Usage-based Theory of Language Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.