From honohiiri at yandex.ru Thu Aug 26 15:10:07 2010 From: honohiiri at yandex.ru (Idiatov Dmitry) Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2010 19:10:07 +0400 Subject: Preliminary Call: Stability and borrowability of interrogative pronominals Message-ID: PRELIMINARY CALL FOR PAPERS FOR A WORKSHOP AT ICHL 20 Workshop title: Stability and borrowability of interrogative pronominals Description: see at the end of this message Conference: 20th International Conference on Historical Linguistics Convenor: Dmitry Idiatov (University of Antwerp; starting from October 1, 2010 – LLACAN-CNRS, Paris) Contact: dmitry.idiatov at ua.ac.be Call deadline: September 14, 2010 Deadline for abstract submission: November 15, 2010 Dear Histling list members, This is a survey of interest for a workshop on the “Stability and borrowability of interrogative pronominals” within the frame of the upcoming 20th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, to be held in Osaka, Japan, July 25-30, 2011 (http://www.ichl2011.com). A description of the topic of the workshop is included at the end of this message. Given that the procedure for organization of a workshop at ICHL 20 (http://www.ichl2011.com/additional_information.html#ichl20) requires to submit the proposal of a workshop, with the names of potential participants and tentative titles, by September 15, 2010, I am looking forward to hearing from those who may be interested in participating in the workshop by September 14, 2010, at dmitry.idiatov at ua.ac.be. Please provide a provisional title of your contribution. After the accepted workshops are announced on the website of ICHL 20, the participants should submit their abstracts through a form on the website of ICHL 20 indicating the workshop that they wish their presentation to be included in. The abstracts must be submitted before November 15, 2010. Dmitry Idiatov Description: “Stability and borrowability of interrogative pronominals” Interrogative pronominals, such as English who? and what?, are usually considered to be among the most change-proof elements in any language. They are believed to be highly resistant to both replacement through borrowing (Haspelmath & Tadmor 2009, Matras 2009:199) and language-internal renewal (Haspelmath 1997:176). In this respect, they strongly resemble personal pronominals. The two kinds of pronominals are also often perceived as good indicators of (long-range) genetic relationships and are regularly included in basic vocabulary lists. However, the view of personal pronominals as highly resistant to borrowing is not uncontroversial (cf. Wallace 1983, Thomason & Everett 2005, Matras 2009:203-208, Law 2009). It has also long been observed that reconstruction of personal pronominals tends to be fraught with difficulties due to their typically short forms and their tendency to undergo irregular changes, such as sound changes specific to them, various kinds of analogical changes and amalgamation with other elements. The workshop aims at assessing the claims on the universality of the extremely slow rate of change and high resistance to borrowing with respect to interrogative pronominals. Particularly welcome are papers on examples of fast changes of interrogative pronominals in families and subgroups, on examples of their borrowing and on the kinds of irregular changes affecting interrogative pronominals. _______________________________________________ Histling-l mailing list Histling-l at mailman.rice.edu https://mailman.rice.edu/mailman/listinfo/histling-l From luraghi at unipv.it Mon Aug 30 09:06:46 2010 From: luraghi at unipv.it (Silvia Luraghi) Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2010 11:06:46 +0200 Subject: Preliminary workshop cann - ICHL 20 - The diachrony of referential null arguments Message-ID: PRELIMINARY CALL FOR PAPERS FOR A WORKSHOP TO BE HELD AT ICHL 20 (Osaka) Workshop title: The diachrony of referential null arguments Convenors: Dag Haug (University of Oslo) / Silvia Luraghi (University of Pavia) Contact: d.t.t.haug at ifikk.uio.no / silvia.luraghi at unipv.it Deadline for manifestation of interest: September 13, 2010 Deadline for abstract submission: November 15, 2010 Dear list members, Dag Haug and I are trying to organize a workshop on the diachrony of referential null arguments at the 20th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, to be held in Osaka, Japan, from July 25 to 30, 2011. The organizer ask us to come up with an indication of possible participants by mid September. We'd like to received proposals on the topic described below in this email by September 13; abstracts must be submitted to the conference organizers by November 15. WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION Definite referential null arguments are apparently one of the distinctive features of non-configurational languges, see Baker (2001). Even though descriptions are available for various genetically unrelated languages (see e.g. Austin 2001, Hale 1983, Chung 1984, Huang 1984, Raposo 1986), there are little if any accounts of their diachrony. The occurrence of definite referential null arguments has been observed in many ancient Indo-European languages, examples can easily be listed: (1) sadyó j tá ós adh bhir vavaks e just born.ptcp.prf.nom.sg.m plant(f).ins.pl grow.prf.mid.3sg yád várdhanti prasvò ghr8téna when increase.prs.3pl shoot.nom.pl.f clarified.butter(n).ins.sg “Just born, (Agni) has grown by means of the plants, when the shoots increase (him) with clarified butter.” RV 3.5.8ab (Vedic Sanskrit); (2) dverginn mælti, at sá baugri skyldi vera dwarf say.prf.3sg that dem.nom.sg.m ring(m) should.prf.3sg be.inf hverjum hofuðsbani, er atti Øi whosoever.dat.sg death rel have.prf.3sg “The dwarf said that that ring should bring death to anybody who possessed (it)” (Old Icelandic, from Sigurðsson, 1993, p. 248); (3) toîsi dè deksiòn hêken ero#diòni eggùs hodoîo Pallàs Athe#naíe:# toì d’ 3pl.dat ptc right send:aor.3sg heron:acc near road:gen P.:nom A.:nom 3pl.nom ptc ouk ídon Øi ophthalmoîsi núkta di’ orphnaíe#n allà Øi klágksantos not see:aor.3pl eyes:dat night:acc through dark:acc but scream:part.gen.sg.m ákousan hear:aor.3pl “Athena sent them an heron to the right of their route: they could not see it in the dark night, but heard it screaming.”, Hom. Il. 10.274-276 (Greek); (4) Caesar duas legionesi in citeriore Gallia novas conscripsit et C.:nom two:acc legion:acc.pl in hither:abl Gaul:abl new:acc.pl enroll:prf.3sg and inita aestate in interiorem Galliam qui Ø­i deduceret begin:part.prf.abl summer:abl in inner:acc Gaul:acc who:nom lead:subj.impf.3sg Quintum Pedium legatum misit Q.: acc P. :acc lieutenent:acc send:prf.3sg “ Caesar enrolled two new legions in Hither Gaul and at the beginning of the summer he sent Quintus Pedius, lieutenant-general, to lead them into Inner Gaul ”, Caes. BG 2.2.1 (Latin). In spite of this, and in spite of the long documented history of these languages, even in their case historical accounts are limited, as are detailed studies of the conditions licensing null arguments (but see Schäufele 1990 on Sanskrit; several studies have been devoted to null arguments in Old Icelandic, see e.g. Sigurðsson 1993 and Rögnvaldsson 1995). At least in Latin and possibly in Greek, null objects seem to be obligatory in coordinated sentences, unless emphasis or disambiguation are involved (see Luraghi 1997, 1998a, b, 2003, Sznayder 1998; frequent in non-Indo-European languages as well, see Harris Delisle 1978, Luraghi 2004), as well as in answers to yes/no questions (see van der Wurff 1997, Luraghi 1997, 2003). Descriptions of increasing use of overt arguments, and in particular objects, in Latin and Germanic point to increasing transitivity or emerging configurationality (see e.g. Johnson 1991, Luraghi 2010). With our workshop we aim to bring together people working on different languages, Indo-European and of other language families, in order to assess a) the relation between null arguments and other parameters of configurationality; b) the relation of null realization and grammatical relation (subject, object); c) the relation between null arguments and the parameter of head/dependent marking (cf. Baker 2001); d) null direct objects (or other non-subject arguments) and the grammaticalization of valency. Papers should have a diachronic orientation; research based on extensive corpora and quantitative approaches to language change are especially encouraged. Austin, Peter K. 2001 Word order in a free word order language: the case of Jiwarli. In Jane Simpson, David Nash, Mary Laughren, Peter Austin and Barry Alpher (eds) Forty years on: Ken Hale and Australian languages, 305-324. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. Baker, Mark (2001), ‘Configurationality and polysynthesis’, in M. Haspelmath, E. König, W. Oesterreicher, W. Raible (eds.), Language Typology and Language Universals . An International Handbook. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, vol. 2, pp. 1433-41. Chung, S. 1984. ‘Identifiability and null objects in Chamorro.’ BLS 10: 116–30. Hale, Kenneth. 1983. Warlpiri and the grammar of non­configurational languages. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 1:5­74. Harris Delisle, Helga 1978 Coordination reduction. In Universals of Human Language, ed. J. Greenberg. Stanford: UP. Pp. 515-583. Huang, C-T. James. 1984. On the distribution and reference of empty pronouns. Linguistic Inquiry, 15, 531-574. Johnson, Ruth Ann, 1991. The Direct Object Pronoun as a Marker of Transitivity in Latin. Ph. D. Diss. UCLA. Luraghi, Silvia 1997. Omission of the direct object in Classical Latin. Indogermanische Forschungen 102, 239-257. Luraghi, Silvia 1998a Omissione dell’oggetto diretto in frasi coordinate: dal latino all’italiano. In Sintassi storica. Atti del xxx Congresso SLI, ed. P. Ramat. Roma: Bulzoni, 183-196. Luraghi, Silvia 1998b Participant tracking in Tacitus. In Estudios de Lingüística Latina, ed. B. García-Hernandez. Madrid: Ediciones Clásicas, 467-485. Luraghi, Silvia 2003, ‘Definite referential null objects in Ancient Greek’. Indogermanische Forschungen 108, 169-196. Luraghi, Silvia (2004), ‘Null Objects in Latin and Greek and the Relevance of Linguistic Typology for Language Reconstruction’, in Proceedings of the 15th Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference, JIES Monograph 49, pp.234-256. Luraghi, Silvia 2010. “The rise (and possible downfall) of configurationality”. In S. Luraghi and V. Bubenik, eds., Continuum Companion to Historical Linguistics, London/New York, Continuum, 212-229 Raposo, Eduardo. 1986. On the null object in European Portuguese. Studies in Romance linguistics, ed. by Osvaldo Jaeggli and Carmen Silva-Corvalán, 373-90. Dordrecht: Foris. Rögnvaldsson, Eiríkur (1995), ‘Old Icelandic: A Non-Configurational Language?’. North-Western European Language Evolution 26, 3-29. Schäufele, Steven (1990), Free Word-Order Syntax: the Challenge from Vedic Sanskrit to Contemporary Formal Syntactic Theory. Ph. D. dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Sigurðsson, Halldór A. (1993), ‘Argument-drop in Old Islandic’. Lingua 89, 247-280. Sznajder, Lyliane, 1998. “Conditions d’effacement des compléments d’objet et agencement des propositions en latin”. In Estudios de Lingüística Latina, ed. B. García-Hernandez. Madrid: Ediciones Clásicas. Dear Histling list members, Silvia Luraghi Dipartimento di Linguistica Teorica e Applicata Università di Pavia Strada Nuova 65 I-27100 Pavia telef.: +39-0382-984685 fax: +39-0382-984487 silvia.luraghi at unipv.it http://lettere.unipv.it/diplinguistica/docenti.php?&id=68 -------------- 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