Fw: post?

[Claire Bowern]

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> International Symposium: Contact Among Genetically Related Languages  
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> Organizers: Patience Epps, John Huehnergard, Na'ama Pat-El
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> April 21-22, 2012
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> One of the major issues discussed in the context of contact is the question of linguistic structure and what contribution typological structural similarity has on the extent of borrowing. The assumption that similar structure is an essential factor in borrowability (“structural compatibility requirement”), which was common early on (Weinreich 1953; Moravcsik 1978) has been abandoned, but recent studies suggest that there is some correlation between structural similarity and structural changes, although this may hold only as a tendency (Haig 2001). To date, most investigations of contact phenomena have focused on languages coming from different or only distantly related families. In such languages, if any similarity exists, it is typological, rather than genetic. Yet the issue of contact among genetically related languages is a crucial problem for historical linguistics, with profound implications for determining subgrouping among related languages, reconstructing protolanguages, and understanding the histories of their speakers. In the past, historical linguistics often worked under the assumption that languages split from a common language (proto-language) and developed independently thereafter. The effects of contact among related languages may lead to erroneous family trees, in which languages are assigned to incorrect nodes on the basis of borrowed similarities. Yet despite these challenges, detailed investigation that weighs different features according to their relative borrowability can make progress toward untangling these complex linguistic relationships. Establishing the methodological best practices and most common pitfalls in distinguishing contact from genetic inheritance remains an outstanding challenge in historical linguistics. Therefore, we plan to conduct an international workshop where relevant test cases will be presented and theoretical debates may further our understanding of the effect of genetic relation on the results of language contact.
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> The workshop is free and open to the public.
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> For more details, please go to: http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/mes/events/conferences/language_contact_2012/language_contact_2012.php
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> Participants:
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> Paul-Alain Beaulieu (University of Toronto)
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> Semitic Languages Interaction in First Millennium BC Iraq
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> Claire Bowern (Yale)
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> Linguistic Split and Language Contact
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> Bridget Drinka (UT San Antonio)
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> Contact, Genetic Relationship, and a New Family Tree Model
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> Patience Epps (UT Austin)
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> Tracing the histories of morphologically complex forms: inheritance, calquing, or independent innovation?
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> Danny Law (Vanderbilt University)
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> Three ways that genetic relatedness shaped the outcome of language contact in the Maya lowlands
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> Maarten Kossmann (Leiden University)
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> Divergence and convergence: a history of Moroccan Arabic
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> Alexander Magidow (UT Austin)
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> Diachrony and Dialects
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> H. Craig Melchert (UCLA)
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> Hittite and Hieroglyphic Luvian arha ‘away': Common Inheritance or Borrowing?
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> Marianne Mithun (UC Sanata Barbara)
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> Challenges and Benefits of Contact among Relatives
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> Na’ama Pat-El (UT Austin)
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> Contact or Inheritance? Criteria for distinguishing internal and external change in genetically related languages
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