From oxmorph at mod-langs.ox.ac.uk Fri Jul 18 18:52:54 2008 From: oxmorph at mod-langs.ox.ac.uk (Oxford Workshop on Romance Verb Morpholo) Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:52:54 +0100 Subject: Programme: First Oxford Workshop on Romance Verb Morphology Message-ID: An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From A.v.Kemenade at let.ru.nl Tue Jul 22 14:58:20 2008 From: A.v.Kemenade at let.ru.nl (Ans van Kemenade) Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:58:20 +0200 Subject: ICHL XIX Nijmegen 2009: call for papers Message-ID: The XIXth International Conference on Historical Linguistics 10-15 August 2009 Radboud University Nijmegen, Centre for Language Studies Invited speakers confirmed so far Russell Gray (Auckland, New Zealand) Giuseppe Longobardi (Trieste) Shana Poplack (Ottawa) John Whitman (Cornell) Charles Yang (Penn) First circular and call for papers Abstracts are invited for papers of 30 minutes including discussion. Please send in an abstract of no more than 300 words, including your most important literature references. The deadline for abstracts is 10 January 2009. The conference will host a number of workshops and thematic sessions, which are listed below. Abstracts for these sessions are submitted, like those for the general sessions, to a separate abstract submission website (under construction). More details on this will be posted in the second circular shortly after the summer. The second circular will also contain more detailed about registration and accommodation. Note the conference e-mail address: ICHL19 at let.ru.nl. The website with more information will be up in the course of August. Local committee: Ans van Kemenade, with Griet Coupé, Marion Elenbaas, Nynke de Haas, Haike Jacobs, Bettelou Los, Margit Rem and Angela Terrill Workshops include The origin of non-canonical subject marking in Indo-European Convener: Jóhanna Barðdal (Bergen) E-mail: johanna.barddal at uib.no Several of the Modern Indo-European languages that have maintained morphological case exhibit structures where the subject(-like) argument is not canonically case marked. These are found amongst the Modern Germanic languages, Modern Russian, the Modern Baltic languages and the Modern Indo-Aryan languages, to mention some. It is traditionally assumed in the literature that these have developed from objects to subjects (see, for instance, Hewson and Bubenik 2006), hence the case marking. Recently, however, it has been argued for Germanic that oblique subjects in the modern languages were syntactic subjects already in Old Germanic (Eythórsson and Barðdal 2005). This raises the question whether these non-canonically case-marked subject(-like) arguments were objects in Proto-Germanic or Proto-Indo-European, or whether they may have been syntactic subjects all along, given an assumption of the alignment system in Proto-Indo-European being a Fluid-S system (cf. Barðdal and Eythórsson 2008). It is, moreover, possible that the case marking patterns of different predicate types have different origins in Indo-European. The aim of this workshop is therefore to gather researchers who work on case marking in Indo-European, and case marking in general, to a forum where the more general topic of the origin of this non-canonical case marking can be discussed. By doing that, we hope to shed light on this important issue within case marking and alignment, historical linguistics, and Indo-European studies. So just what IS sound change anyway? Definitional, conceptual, and empirical issues in the study of change in sound. Convener: Brian Joseph (Ohio State). E-mail: Bjoseph at ling.ohio-state.edu The study of sound change is in many ways the foundation upon which modern (post-18th century) historical linguistics has been built, yet much about it still remains unaccounted for. Even something as basic as what we mean by the term "sound change"--- i.e., any change in the realization of the sounds of a word, only phonetically driven change in sounds, only systemic changes in sound patterns, only regular (in the Neogrammarian sense) change in sounds, or what? --- is not agreed upon by all historical linguists, and the respective roles of social factors as opposed to phonological (systemic) factors as opposed to phonetic (articulatory and acoustic) factors in sound change are yet to be fully sorted out. The framing issues for this day-long workshop are how sound change is to be defined, how sound change achieves regularity (if it ever does), how is sound change to be separated out from other changes that have similar effects, whether innovation is to be distinguished from spread in studying and understanding sound change, and what is at stake in characterizing sound change in a precise way. Spatial dynamics of language change Conveners: Roeland van Hout (Nijmegen) and Gertjan Postma (Meertensinstituut) E-mail: Gertjanpostma at mac.com This workshop will focus on the way we can incorporate space in our models of language variation and change and how we can shift from static to dynamic interpretations of spatial relationships. A first step is building in the space factor in quantitative models of language variation. This is done in gravity models as applied by Trudgill (1974) in which space is incorporated as a distance factor. Another example is Hard (1972) who used computer simulations for testing diffusion processes. Nerbonne & Heeringa (2001) and Spruijt (2008) map dialect distances to colours on the basis of multidimensional scaling. In language typology we see new methods of visualizing linguistic distances (clustering, neighbourhood analysis; Longobardi & Guardiano (2005), Dunn et al. (2005), McMahon & McMahon 2003), and the question arises how we can relate it to geography. Is there a way to infer from the space-like dynamics of a change to the structural properties involved, similar to what Kroch established for the time dimension? Do related isoglosses spread with similar speed and/or steepness? For instance, in work dealing with the diphtongization isogloss in Flanders, Taeldeman (2001) ties the smoothness/ sharpness of a dialect boundary to its socio-temporal dynamics: only isoglosses that represent active phonetic shifts proceed smoothly, while in subsequent stages of lexical diffusion, the isogloss exhibits a sharper edge. One of the challenges of this workshop is to explore how to tie spatial dynamics to structural properties, parallel to what the Constant Rate Hypothesis captures in time-dimension (tying properties of the temporal dynamics to relations in the parameter settings of the varieties involved). Kinship terminologies:change and reconstruction Conveners: Patrick McConvell (Australian National University) and Jeff Marck (Cairo) E-mail: Patrick.mcconvell at anu.edu.au Study of kinship terminologies and systems has been one of the major joint endeavours of comparative linguistics and the social sciences, especially anthropology. Reconstruction of prehistoric systems has shed light on the form of the societies of proto-language speakers and the changes leading to present-day societies. In turn the systematic study of the typology of, and constraints on, kinship systems in anthropology has assisted linguists in their reconstruction work. While kinship, particularly diachronic kinship, has become unfashionable in anthropology in the last 20-30 years, it is now experiencing a renaissance, with new publications appearing often drawing on linguistic evidence. There is also significant interest in history in documented kinship changes in Europe and elsewhere, and this provides a more detailed source about transitions in meanings and their motivations which can aid in reconstruction. We are calling for papers on examples of reconstruction of proto-terminologies in families and sub-groups; change in morphology, semantics and usage, and borrowing of terms, whether based on prehistoric reconstructions or written sources. Papers on theoretical and methodological issues, especially addressing the interdisciplinary nature of this field, are also welcome. Language and Migration Convener: Rob Howell (Madison) E-mail: rbhowell at wisc.edu Historical linguists have long recognized that demographic shifts can play a major role in language change. Nonetheless, the effects of migration and the resultant language and or dialect contact are poorly understood. Despite a surge in research on language contact, dialect contact and koineisation over the past three decades, the wide range of linguistic outcomes of migration-induced language- and dialect-contact situations implies that facile approaches to the issue will prove inadequate. This workshop aims to tackle the thorny issues surrounding the linguistic outcomes of migration. Research dealing with any part of the world and any period of history is welcome. That said, we are really looking for papers that are data-heavy on two fronts. On the one hand, we hope that submissions will be based on extensive linguistic/philological data capturing changes in progress. On the other hand, the research should present socio-historical data of sufficient detail to link the linguistic change described to the demographic change posited as its cause. These requirements for the most part limit appropriate submissions to the early modern or modern periods, but we are open to projects dealing with any period in history. Grammaticalization in East Asia Convener: Kazuha Watanabe (Cal State Fullerton) E-mail: kwatanabe at Exchange.FULLERTON.EDU Previous research on grammaticalization in East Asian languages mainly focuses on the individual changes occurring in a specific language as well as comparison between examples from Asian languages and previous studies in European languages as an isolated phenomenon. For example, while TAM markers in these languages have been studied extensively, most of the work concentrates on the development path of individual markers, rather than change in TAM system as a whole. In addition, the research data is often collected from the standard variety of a language, while the dialectal data is often neglected. Therefore, this section adopts a systematic approach; the emphases will be given to an example of grammaticalization which triggers paradigmatic change, as well as typological findings in East Asian languages as a whole, in a specific language family, or among dialects of one language, which differ from the rest of the world. The systematic approach to grammaticalization will not only enable us to amalgamate the previous findings of the individual changes, it will also evaluate their validity. Information structure in historical linguistics Conveners: Kristin Eide (Trondheim), Roland Hinterhölzl (HU Berlin), Ioanna Sitaridou (Cambridge) E-mail: k.g.eide at ilos.uio.no Recent years have seen a growing interest in the study of information structure in linguistics. Given that information structure is a fine exemplification of how ‘division of labour’ works between different components of the grammar it is hardly surprising to see the rise of numerous works cast within different frameworks (e.g. OT, minimalism, discourse-oriented models, phonology-oriented models, etc.). However, despite how well-studied information structure is in synchronic terms, this is hardly the case in historical linguistics. The reasons are pretty obvious since many of the methods used to identify information structure in modern languages, such as laboratory phonology research, are not available to historical linguists. Nevertheless, it is now becoming imperative to investigate the articulation of information structure in historical texts given that some of our assumptions about word order change for instance crucially depend on that. The present workshop seeks to provide answers to the following questions: (a) How do we transfer knowledge we have on modern languages through laboratory research on phonological phenomena such as sentence intonation and sentence stress/focus stress to historical linguistics? What methods are available to us for the identification of information packaging? How reliable are these methods? (b) What is the interaction between grammar, and in particular, between syntax and information structure? (c) Is information structure part of syntax, as suggested by the cartographic approach, or is it outside syntax namely the choice of particular syntactic structures is guided by specific discourse situations? What insights can be gained with respect to these questions from the historical perspective? (d) Do we have evidence for grammaticalized information structure in older languages? Or, for reshuffling of information structure systems through different processes? We encourage submission of abstracts for papers addressing any of the topics mentioned above. Papers should explicitly draw theoretical implications from their findings regarding the nature of information structure in the historical context. New perspectives on Baltic, Slavic and Balto-Slavic Conveners: Imke Mendoza (Salzburg), Eugen Hill (München). E-mail: eugen.hill at lrz.uni-muenchen.de “The diachronic relationship between the Baltic and the Slavic languages is one of the most intriguing puzzles of Indo-European linguistics. Although these groups of languages constitute two separate branches of Indo-European, they share an unusually high number of common innovations concerning the inflectional, derivational and accentual system. Despite many years of research, the reason for the striking similarity remains unclear. There are two competing, although not mutually exclusive hypotheses. One assumes an intermediate Balto-Slavic stage after the break up of Proto-Indo-European. The other hypothesis seeks to explain the similarities within the framework of language contact, i.e as a result of their longstanding geographic relationship. Both positions have been argued, but neither has been generally accepted. During the last few decades, international research has concentrated on particular grammatical features of Baltic and Slavic. Most of these studies while useful, however, focused on either Baltic or Slavic without taking into account the other language group. The goal of the workshop therefore is to bring together scholars with expertise in Baltic and in Slavic and to find some new answers to the old question about the existence of a Balto-Slavic unity.” Procedural meanings in diachrony Conveners: Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen (Manchester) & Jacqueline Visconti (Genoa) This workshop will be concerned with all aspects (descriptive, theoretical and/or methodological) of the diachronic evolution of procedural meanings, understood here as linguistic items/constructions that provide instructions to hearers on how to integrate the contentful elements of the message within an evolving mental model of the discourse, at both the ideational level (including, for instance, temporal or causal relations between events, or the indexing of referents) and the interpersonal level (including, prominently, indexing the speaker’s attitudes to the discourse and its participants, and indexing metatextual relationships between propositions or between propositions and the extra-linguistic context). Procedural meanings thus not only include pragmatic items such discourse markers, focus particles, modal particles, scalar items, interpersonal markers, approximatives, address terms, markers of information structure, etc., but also grammatical morphemes and constructions. Discussion of the explanatory value of the competing notions of grammaticalization, pragmaticalization, and lexicalization, and proposals for further refinement of those notions, will be at the center of interest, as will the question of the causes and mechanisms of semantic/pragmatic change. Two main objectives of the workshop will be: · to discover whether there are, across languages, characteristic pathways of diachronic change for grammatical morphemes, on the one hand, and pragmatic items, on the other; · to investigate how meanings that are coded in language structure arise from language use in actual communication. Gender marking Convener: Gunther de Vogelaer (Ghent) E-mail:gunther.devogelaer at ugent.be Despite several decades of research, our understanding of grammatical gender systems is still relatively poor in comparison to other parts of grammar. The present workshop aims at taking stock of current developments in the field, tackling question including, but not restricted to, the following: - Patterns of change in gender systems: can we find any regularity in changes that gender systems can undergo? And to what extent can we derive answers from such patterns with regard to more fundamental questions such as the quest for triggers in gender change (deflection, language contact), the function of grammatical gender, or the structure of gender systems? - Loss or renewal of grammatical gender: in Indo-european languages, most ongoing changes concern the loss of aspects of the gender system, such as the decrease of the number of genders or the loss of gender agreement from parts of the grammar (although there are exceptions, such as the emergence of a ‘neo-neuter’ in varieties of Italian (Haase 2000). Are there language families where the reverse is observed, i.e. frequent changes towards more genders or towards more gender agreement? In addition, to what extent do these innovations match alleged universal pathways such as the one proposed by Greenberg (1978). - The global distribution of grammatical gender: it appears that gender systems are quite widespread in the world, but not universal (cf. the WALS). Are there any linguistic properties that facilitate or inhibit the presence of grammatical gender? And how can such correlations be explained? - Grammatical gender and theories of language change: recent data, e.g. from Dutch, have shown substantial differences in the way grammatical gender is acquired in L1 and L2. Hence data on gender change can be shed some light over the ongoing debate on the role of L1 vs. L2 speakers in language change. Complementation In Diachrony Conveners: Dr. Theodore Markopoulos (Uppsala) and Dr. Christina Sevdali (Ulster) E-mail: C.Sevdali at ulster.ac.uk Complementation is an issue encompassing various domains of linguistic analysis: syntax, morphology, semantics / pragmatics, and therefore, changes affecting patterns of complementation can have important repercussions for the whole morphosyntactic frame of a language. In this workshop, it is our goal to explore aspects of changes in the complementation system(s) of languages, including: The diachronic paths manifested in argument structure of verbs, as seen in syntactic, semantic / pragmatic as well as morphological changes related to specific verbs classes or to the overall verbal domain of a language The clausal complementation system and, more precisely, issues regarding finite vs. non-finite complements and how such patterns evolve diachronically. An interesting example is the case of Greek that has passed from a predominantly infinitival to an almost entirely finite complementation system, compared to the case of English which shows an increasing restriction in the use of finite complements between the Old and Middle English periods. Factors determining such large-scale changes can be of paramount interest for historical linguistics since among other things, they also relate to the question of directionality of language change. The nominal complementation patterns and their relation to verbal complementation and the changes affecting the latter. We believe that diachronic paths of complementation have been under-explored despite their obvious significance, and by this workshop we seek to start redressing the balance. Making the best of bad data in historical contact linguistics Convener: Margot vd Berg (Nijmegen). E-mail: M.v.d.Berg at let.ru.nl Even more than historical linguists working on Dutch, Arabic or Tamil for example, linguists studying contact languages (pidgins, creoles, koines, World Englishes etc.) from an historical perspective are faced with the problem of bad data: In addition to a relative paucity of historical documents illustrating authentic spoken language, the available documents that contain information in and on the language derive more often than not from authors who are not native speakers of the reported language. Can these documents still be regarded as reliable and representative? What methods do historical contact linguists use these days to make the best of bad data? Can bad data influence our notion of language formation? This workshop seeks to bring together scholars working on contact languages world-wide from an historical perspective, socio-historical as well as linguistic. Contributions are solicited that a) address (one of) the questions raised above, or b) advance a theory of contact language formation on the basis of new data-driven investigations. Thus, this workshop offers its participants a taste of state of the art historical contact linguistics. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Histling-l mailing list Histling-l at mailman.rice.edu https://mailman.rice.edu/mailman/listinfo/histling-l From oxmorph at mod-langs.ox.ac.uk Fri Jul 18 18:52:54 2008 From: oxmorph at mod-langs.ox.ac.uk (Oxford Workshop on Romance Verb Morpholo) Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:52:54 +0100 Subject: Programme: First Oxford Workshop on Romance Verb Morphology Message-ID: An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed... Name: not available URL: From A.v.Kemenade at let.ru.nl Tue Jul 22 14:58:20 2008 From: A.v.Kemenade at let.ru.nl (Ans van Kemenade) Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:58:20 +0200 Subject: ICHL XIX Nijmegen 2009: call for papers Message-ID: The XIXth International Conference on Historical Linguistics 10-15 August 2009 Radboud University Nijmegen, Centre for Language Studies Invited speakers confirmed so far Russell Gray (Auckland, New Zealand) Giuseppe Longobardi (Trieste) Shana Poplack (Ottawa) John Whitman (Cornell) Charles Yang (Penn) First circular and call for papers Abstracts are invited for papers of 30 minutes including discussion. Please send in an abstract of no more than 300 words, including your most important literature references. The deadline for abstracts is 10 January 2009. The conference will host a number of workshops and thematic sessions, which are listed below. Abstracts for these sessions are submitted, like those for the general sessions, to a separate abstract submission website (under construction). More details on this will be posted in the second circular shortly after the summer. The second circular will also contain more detailed about registration and accommodation. Note the conference e-mail address: ICHL19 at let.ru.nl. The website with more information will be up in the course of August. Local committee: Ans van Kemenade, with Griet Coup?, Marion Elenbaas, Nynke de Haas, Haike Jacobs, Bettelou Los, Margit Rem and Angela Terrill Workshops include The origin of non-canonical subject marking in Indo-European Convener: J?hanna Bar?dal (Bergen) E-mail: johanna.barddal at uib.no Several of the Modern Indo-European languages that have maintained morphological case exhibit structures where the subject(-like) argument is not canonically case marked. These are found amongst the Modern Germanic languages, Modern Russian, the Modern Baltic languages and the Modern Indo-Aryan languages, to mention some. It is traditionally assumed in the literature that these have developed from objects to subjects (see, for instance, Hewson and Bubenik 2006), hence the case marking. Recently, however, it has been argued for Germanic that oblique subjects in the modern languages were syntactic subjects already in Old Germanic (Eyth?rsson and Bar?dal 2005). This raises the question whether these non-canonically case-marked subject(-like) arguments were objects in Proto-Germanic or Proto-Indo-European, or whether they may have been syntactic subjects all along, given an assumption of the alignment system in Proto-Indo-European being a Fluid-S system (cf. Bar?dal and Eyth?rsson 2008). It is, moreover, possible that the case marking patterns of different predicate types have different origins in Indo-European. The aim of this workshop is therefore to gather researchers who work on case marking in Indo-European, and case marking in general, to a forum where the more general topic of the origin of this non-canonical case marking can be discussed. By doing that, we hope to shed light on this important issue within case marking and alignment, historical linguistics, and Indo-European studies. So just what IS sound change anyway? Definitional, conceptual, and empirical issues in the study of change in sound. Convener: Brian Joseph (Ohio State). E-mail: Bjoseph at ling.ohio-state.edu The study of sound change is in many ways the foundation upon which modern (post-18th century) historical linguistics has been built, yet much about it still remains unaccounted for. Even something as basic as what we mean by the term "sound change"--- i.e., any change in the realization of the sounds of a word, only phonetically driven change in sounds, only systemic changes in sound patterns, only regular (in the Neogrammarian sense) change in sounds, or what? --- is not agreed upon by all historical linguists, and the respective roles of social factors as opposed to phonological (systemic) factors as opposed to phonetic (articulatory and acoustic) factors in sound change are yet to be fully sorted out. The framing issues for this day-long workshop are how sound change is to be defined, how sound change achieves regularity (if it ever does), how is sound change to be separated out from other changes that have similar effects, whether innovation is to be distinguished from spread in studying and understanding sound change, and what is at stake in characterizing sound change in a precise way. Spatial dynamics of language change Conveners: Roeland van Hout (Nijmegen) and Gertjan Postma (Meertensinstituut) E-mail: Gertjanpostma at mac.com This workshop will focus on the way we can incorporate space in our models of language variation and change and how we can shift from static to dynamic interpretations of spatial relationships. A first step is building in the space factor in quantitative models of language variation. This is done in gravity models as applied by Trudgill (1974) in which space is incorporated as a distance factor. Another example is Hard (1972) who used computer simulations for testing diffusion processes. Nerbonne & Heeringa (2001) and Spruijt (2008) map dialect distances to colours on the basis of multidimensional scaling. In language typology we see new methods of visualizing linguistic distances (clustering, neighbourhood analysis; Longobardi & Guardiano (2005), Dunn et al. (2005), McMahon & McMahon 2003), and the question arises how we can relate it to geography. Is there a way to infer from the space-like dynamics of a change to the structural properties involved, similar to what Kroch established for the time dimension? Do related isoglosses spread with similar speed and/or steepness? For instance, in work dealing with the diphtongization isogloss in Flanders, Taeldeman (2001) ties the smoothness/ sharpness of a dialect boundary to its socio-temporal dynamics: only isoglosses that represent active phonetic shifts proceed smoothly, while in subsequent stages of lexical diffusion, the isogloss exhibits a sharper edge. One of the challenges of this workshop is to explore how to tie spatial dynamics to structural properties, parallel to what the Constant Rate Hypothesis captures in time-dimension (tying properties of the temporal dynamics to relations in the parameter settings of the varieties involved). Kinship terminologies:change and reconstruction Conveners: Patrick McConvell (Australian National University) and Jeff Marck (Cairo) E-mail: Patrick.mcconvell at anu.edu.au Study of kinship terminologies and systems has been one of the major joint endeavours of comparative linguistics and the social sciences, especially anthropology. Reconstruction of prehistoric systems has shed light on the form of the societies of proto-language speakers and the changes leading to present-day societies. In turn the systematic study of the typology of, and constraints on, kinship systems in anthropology has assisted linguists in their reconstruction work. While kinship, particularly diachronic kinship, has become unfashionable in anthropology in the last 20-30 years, it is now experiencing a renaissance, with new publications appearing often drawing on linguistic evidence. There is also significant interest in history in documented kinship changes in Europe and elsewhere, and this provides a more detailed source about transitions in meanings and their motivations which can aid in reconstruction. We are calling for papers on examples of reconstruction of proto-terminologies in families and sub-groups; change in morphology, semantics and usage, and borrowing of terms, whether based on prehistoric reconstructions or written sources. Papers on theoretical and methodological issues, especially addressing the interdisciplinary nature of this field, are also welcome. Language and Migration Convener: Rob Howell (Madison) E-mail: rbhowell at wisc.edu Historical linguists have long recognized that demographic shifts can play a major role in language change. Nonetheless, the effects of migration and the resultant language and or dialect contact are poorly understood. Despite a surge in research on language contact, dialect contact and koineisation over the past three decades, the wide range of linguistic outcomes of migration-induced language- and dialect-contact situations implies that facile approaches to the issue will prove inadequate. This workshop aims to tackle the thorny issues surrounding the linguistic outcomes of migration. Research dealing with any part of the world and any period of history is welcome. That said, we are really looking for papers that are data-heavy on two fronts. On the one hand, we hope that submissions will be based on extensive linguistic/philological data capturing changes in progress. On the other hand, the research should present socio-historical data of sufficient detail to link the linguistic change described to the demographic change posited as its cause. These requirements for the most part limit appropriate submissions to the early modern or modern periods, but we are open to projects dealing with any period in history. Grammaticalization in East Asia Convener: Kazuha Watanabe (Cal State Fullerton) E-mail: kwatanabe at Exchange.FULLERTON.EDU Previous research on grammaticalization in East Asian languages mainly focuses on the individual changes occurring in a specific language as well as comparison between examples from Asian languages and previous studies in European languages as an isolated phenomenon. For example, while TAM markers in these languages have been studied extensively, most of the work concentrates on the development path of individual markers, rather than change in TAM system as a whole. In addition, the research data is often collected from the standard variety of a language, while the dialectal data is often neglected. Therefore, this section adopts a systematic approach; the emphases will be given to an example of grammaticalization which triggers paradigmatic change, as well as typological findings in East Asian languages as a whole, in a specific language family, or among dialects of one language, which differ from the rest of the world. The systematic approach to grammaticalization will not only enable us to amalgamate the previous findings of the individual changes, it will also evaluate their validity. Information structure in historical linguistics Conveners: Kristin Eide (Trondheim), Roland Hinterh?lzl (HU Berlin), Ioanna Sitaridou (Cambridge) E-mail: k.g.eide at ilos.uio.no Recent years have seen a growing interest in the study of information structure in linguistics. Given that information structure is a fine exemplification of how ?division of labour? works between different components of the grammar it is hardly surprising to see the rise of numerous works cast within different frameworks (e.g. OT, minimalism, discourse-oriented models, phonology-oriented models, etc.). However, despite how well-studied information structure is in synchronic terms, this is hardly the case in historical linguistics. The reasons are pretty obvious since many of the methods used to identify information structure in modern languages, such as laboratory phonology research, are not available to historical linguists. Nevertheless, it is now becoming imperative to investigate the articulation of information structure in historical texts given that some of our assumptions about word order change for instance crucially depend on that. The present workshop seeks to provide answers to the following questions: (a) How do we transfer knowledge we have on modern languages through laboratory research on phonological phenomena such as sentence intonation and sentence stress/focus stress to historical linguistics? What methods are available to us for the identification of information packaging? How reliable are these methods? (b) What is the interaction between grammar, and in particular, between syntax and information structure? (c) Is information structure part of syntax, as suggested by the cartographic approach, or is it outside syntax namely the choice of particular syntactic structures is guided by specific discourse situations? What insights can be gained with respect to these questions from the historical perspective? (d) Do we have evidence for grammaticalized information structure in older languages? Or, for reshuffling of information structure systems through different processes? We encourage submission of abstracts for papers addressing any of the topics mentioned above. Papers should explicitly draw theoretical implications from their findings regarding the nature of information structure in the historical context. New perspectives on Baltic, Slavic and Balto-Slavic Conveners: Imke Mendoza (Salzburg), Eugen Hill (M?nchen). E-mail: eugen.hill at lrz.uni-muenchen.de ?The diachronic relationship between the Baltic and the Slavic languages is one of the most intriguing puzzles of Indo-European linguistics. Although these groups of languages constitute two separate branches of Indo-European, they share an unusually high number of common innovations concerning the inflectional, derivational and accentual system. Despite many years of research, the reason for the striking similarity remains unclear. There are two competing, although not mutually exclusive hypotheses. One assumes an intermediate Balto-Slavic stage after the break up of Proto-Indo-European. The other hypothesis seeks to explain the similarities within the framework of language contact, i.e as a result of their longstanding geographic relationship. Both positions have been argued, but neither has been generally accepted. During the last few decades, international research has concentrated on particular grammatical features of Baltic and Slavic. Most of these studies while useful, however, focused on either Baltic or Slavic without taking into account the other language group. The goal of the workshop therefore is to bring together scholars with expertise in Baltic and in Slavic and to find some new answers to the old question about the existence of a Balto-Slavic unity.? Procedural meanings in diachrony Conveners: Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen (Manchester) & Jacqueline Visconti (Genoa) This workshop will be concerned with all aspects (descriptive, theoretical and/or methodological) of the diachronic evolution of procedural meanings, understood here as linguistic items/constructions that provide instructions to hearers on how to integrate the contentful elements of the message within an evolving mental model of the discourse, at both the ideational level (including, for instance, temporal or causal relations between events, or the indexing of referents) and the interpersonal level (including, prominently, indexing the speaker?s attitudes to the discourse and its participants, and indexing metatextual relationships between propositions or between propositions and the extra-linguistic context). Procedural meanings thus not only include pragmatic items such discourse markers, focus particles, modal particles, scalar items, interpersonal markers, approximatives, address terms, markers of information structure, etc., but also grammatical morphemes and constructions. Discussion of the explanatory value of the competing notions of grammaticalization, pragmaticalization, and lexicalization, and proposals for further refinement of those notions, will be at the center of interest, as will the question of the causes and mechanisms of semantic/pragmatic change. Two main objectives of the workshop will be: ? to discover whether there are, across languages, characteristic pathways of diachronic change for grammatical morphemes, on the one hand, and pragmatic items, on the other; ? to investigate how meanings that are coded in language structure arise from language use in actual communication. Gender marking Convener: Gunther de Vogelaer (Ghent) E-mail:gunther.devogelaer at ugent.be Despite several decades of research, our understanding of grammatical gender systems is still relatively poor in comparison to other parts of grammar. The present workshop aims at taking stock of current developments in the field, tackling question including, but not restricted to, the following: - Patterns of change in gender systems: can we find any regularity in changes that gender systems can undergo? And to what extent can we derive answers from such patterns with regard to more fundamental questions such as the quest for triggers in gender change (deflection, language contact), the function of grammatical gender, or the structure of gender systems? - Loss or renewal of grammatical gender: in Indo-european languages, most ongoing changes concern the loss of aspects of the gender system, such as the decrease of the number of genders or the loss of gender agreement from parts of the grammar (although there are exceptions, such as the emergence of a ?neo-neuter? in varieties of Italian (Haase 2000). Are there language families where the reverse is observed, i.e. frequent changes towards more genders or towards more gender agreement? In addition, to what extent do these innovations match alleged universal pathways such as the one proposed by Greenberg (1978). - The global distribution of grammatical gender: it appears that gender systems are quite widespread in the world, but not universal (cf. the WALS). Are there any linguistic properties that facilitate or inhibit the presence of grammatical gender? And how can such correlations be explained? - Grammatical gender and theories of language change: recent data, e.g. from Dutch, have shown substantial differences in the way grammatical gender is acquired in L1 and L2. Hence data on gender change can be shed some light over the ongoing debate on the role of L1 vs. L2 speakers in language change. Complementation In Diachrony Conveners: Dr. Theodore Markopoulos (Uppsala) and Dr. Christina Sevdali (Ulster) E-mail: C.Sevdali at ulster.ac.uk Complementation is an issue encompassing various domains of linguistic analysis: syntax, morphology, semantics / pragmatics, and therefore, changes affecting patterns of complementation can have important repercussions for the whole morphosyntactic frame of a language. In this workshop, it is our goal to explore aspects of changes in the complementation system(s) of languages, including: The diachronic paths manifested in argument structure of verbs, as seen in syntactic, semantic / pragmatic as well as morphological changes related to specific verbs classes or to the overall verbal domain of a language The clausal complementation system and, more precisely, issues regarding finite vs. non-finite complements and how such patterns evolve diachronically. An interesting example is the case of Greek that has passed from a predominantly infinitival to an almost entirely finite complementation system, compared to the case of English which shows an increasing restriction in the use of finite complements between the Old and Middle English periods. Factors determining such large-scale changes can be of paramount interest for historical linguistics since among other things, they also relate to the question of directionality of language change. The nominal complementation patterns and their relation to verbal complementation and the changes affecting the latter. We believe that diachronic paths of complementation have been under-explored despite their obvious significance, and by this workshop we seek to start redressing the balance. Making the best of bad data in historical contact linguistics Convener: Margot vd Berg (Nijmegen). E-mail: M.v.d.Berg at let.ru.nl Even more than historical linguists working on Dutch, Arabic or Tamil for example, linguists studying contact languages (pidgins, creoles, koines, World Englishes etc.) from an historical perspective are faced with the problem of bad data: In addition to a relative paucity of historical documents illustrating authentic spoken language, the available documents that contain information in and on the language derive more often than not from authors who are not native speakers of the reported language. Can these documents still be regarded as reliable and representative? What methods do historical contact linguists use these days to make the best of bad data? Can bad data influence our notion of language formation? This workshop seeks to bring together scholars working on contact languages world-wide from an historical perspective, socio-historical as well as linguistic. Contributions are solicited that a) address (one of) the questions raised above, or b) advance a theory of contact language formation on the basis of new data-driven investigations. Thus, this workshop offers its participants a taste of state of the art historical contact linguistics. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Histling-l mailing list Histling-l at mailman.rice.edu https://mailman.rice.edu/mailman/listinfo/histling-l