From annaram at unipv.it Tue Jul 2 19:48:48 2013 From: annaram at unipv.it (Anna Giacalone) Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2013 21:48:48 +0200 Subject: book announcement Message-ID: Dear List members, the following book has been just published by Benjamins [SLCS 133]: Synchrony and Diachrony A dynamic interface Edited by Anna Giacalone Ramat, Caterina Mauri and Piera Molinelli University of Pavia / University of Bergamo-- Please see the enclosed flier for more details Anna Giacalone Ramat Anna Giacalone Ramat Professore Emerito Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici- Sezione di Linguistica teorica e applicata Strada Nuova 65, 27100 PAVIA telef.: +39-0382-984484 fax: +39-0382-984487 annaram at unipv.it http://lettere.unipv.it/diplinguistica/docenti.php?&id=96 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: flier slcs.133.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 674808 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Histling-l mailing list Histling-l at mailman.rice.edu https://mailman.rice.edu/mailman/listinfo/histling-l From ilja.serzants at uni-konstanz.de Thu Jul 4 16:37:38 2013 From: ilja.serzants at uni-konstanz.de (Ilja Serzants) Date: Thu, 4 Jul 2013 18:37:38 +0200 Subject: CfP: The Diachronic Typology of Differential Argument Marking / University of Konstanz, April 5-6, 2014 Message-ID: - apologizes for multiple posting - *CALL FOR PAPERS* /E-mail:/ DAM.2014 at uni-konstanz.de. /URL:/ http://www.uni-konstanz.de/serzants/DAM_2014/ Workshop/Conference: *The Diachronic Typology of Differential Argument Marking, *University of Konstanz, April 5-6, 2014 Differential marking of grammatical relations has been the topic of a number of investigations. However, no large-scale, comprehensive study of the historical development of the differential case-marking strategies has been carried out yet. The present workshop aims at filling this gap. Its task is to uncover the multi-factorial mechanisms leading to the rise of the differential argument marking, more specifically, to the Differential Subject- (DSM) and the Differential Object Marking (DOM). The phenomenon of the DOM/DSM is typically conditioned various factors such as definiteness and/or specificity, or discourse prominence, cf. Aissen (2003), Bossong (1998), von Heusinger and Kaiser (2007), Kittilä (2006), Kittilä et al. (2011), Leonetti (2004), just to mention some. Cross-linguistically, it may be differently realized formally and triggered by a variety of conditions (cf. de Hoop and de Swart 2008). Beside DOM/DSM based on formal or semantic properties of the respective NP, it may also be governed by the tense or aspectual properties of the verb phrase or the clause type (de Hoop, forthc.). The DSM/DOM phenomena are also sensitive to the thematic roles of the respective arguments (e.g., rather to agents and less to experiencers), and their inherent properties. Thus DSM often involves the marking of highly agentive subjects rather than atypical ones (cf. de Hoop and Malchukov 2007, de Hoop and de Swart 2008), in order to contrast both arguments of a transitive clause. Striking about the DOM/DSM phenomena is the fact that the aforementioned distinctions are often morphologically expressed by assigning distinct cases, quasi-allomorph case affixes or prepositions to encode these contrasts. From the typological research we know, however, that the primary function of case is to encode relations among constituents of a clause (Blake 2001), including the thematic roles, whereas such NP properties as definiteness/specificity/non-referentiality, animacy, and discursive prominence are typically encoded by other means, e.g., by determiners primarily. We ask how this atypical functional extension of the case-related morphological inventory emerges historically. We are not only interested in the functional history of the phenomenon; syntactic changes that lead to syntactically uniform behaviour of both alternating markings is equally interesting and unstudied. Thus, at an early developmental stage, the assignment of different cases may have impact on the syntactic properties of that argument, cf. (1) from Russian: (1) / Ja vypil sok / sok-a/ I:NOM drink:PAST juice:ACC(=NOM) / juice-GEN 'I drank up the jouce / I drank (some) juice.' The clause in (1), if uttered with the object NP sok, can be passivized, while with the (partitive) genitive-marked NP sok-a the passivization and thereby the promotion of the object NP into the subject is not available. Essentially, while our knowledge on functional semantics of DOM/DSM and its possible integration into different approaches to grammar has considerably increased in the last decades, there has not been done much research on how DOM/DSM arise across languages and what are the triggering mechanisms for it. The whole process involving a non-trivial shift in the domain of application from the functional domain of a "typical" case, i.e. from encoding relations among constituents, into, e.g., the domain of definiteness or specificity, ontological classes or aspectually relevant opposition (e.g., partitive vs. total in Finnic), has not been extensively studied yet. We invite contributions relating to any aspect of the DSM/DOM diachrony from any perspective. We emphasize that diachrony does not necessarily imply reconstructions of proto-stages of a language or involvement of ancient texts. Diachronic changes can be observed on a quasi-synchronic level, e.g., between the conservative and colloquial style of a present day language. Moreover, such quasi-synchronic changes can often be described and analyzed even at a more fine-grained level and, hence, provide for more insights on what kind of diachronic processes DAM systems typically undergo. We welcome studies dealing with macro-changes (e.g., with the rise or demise of DAM) as well as studies treating micro-changes (e.g., changes in the functional semantics of a particular DAM system). Possible questions that might be addressed includes (but are not confined to) the following: - What is the etymology of the morphological markers that gave rise to DOM/DSM? - How to model the functional shift of a prototypical case marker into a DSM/DOM marker with the respective (e.g., determiner-like) semantics in the particular case? - How to model the morphosyntactic development from a solid, valence-driven case frame of a predicate into a sort of labile predicate with a DSM/DOM-driven case frame? - What kinds of morphosyntactic processes enable overriding or loosening the case frame? - What kind of syntactic changes accompany rise, development and demise of DAM? - Are the animacy-driven, definiteness-driven, information-structure-driven DOM/DSM phenomena diachronically interrelated with regard to their relative chronology? Which function is typically acquired first? - What is the relative chronology of the lexical input restrictions in the rise of DOM/DSM? Which NP types acquire DOM/DSM first and which last? - How can DOM/DSM phenomena be transferred or copied via language contact? - How do DOM/DSM disappear in favor of a straightforward government? - Can DOM/DSM be regarded as just transitional stages in a development, whereby some new, productive case-marking pattern replaces the old one (or the lack thereof) and develops into a canonical object or subject case-marking, respectively, gradually affecting more and more NP types? References Aissen, Judith (2003): Differential Object marking: Iconicity vs. Economy. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 21, 435-448. Blake, Barry J. (2001): Case. Cambridge textbooks in linguistics. 2nd edition. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Bossong, G. (1998): Le marquage différentiel de l'objet dans les langues d'Europe. In: Feuillet, J. (ed.): Actance et Valence dans les Language de l'Europe. Berlin, New York : Mouton de Gryuter, 193-258. de Hoop, Helen, forthc.: The rise of animacy based differential subject marking in Dutch. In: Seržant, I. A. and L. Kulikov (eds.), The The Diachronic Typology of Non-canonical Subjects. SLCS. Amsterdam/Philadelphia. John Benjamins. de Hoop, Helen and Malchukov, Andrej (2007): On fluid differential case marking: a bidirectional OT account. Lingua 117, 1636-1656. de Hoop, Helen and Peter de Swart eds., (2008): Differential subject marking. Dordrecht: Springer. von Heusinger, Klaus and Georg A. Kaiser (2007): Differential Object Marking and the lexical semantics of verbs in Spanish. In: Kaiser, G.A. and M. Leonetti (eds.): Proceedings of the Workshop "Definiteness, Specificity and Animacy in Ibero-Romance Languages". Universität Constance (Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft. Arbeitspapier 122), 85-110. Kittilä, Seppo T. (2006): Object-, animacy- and role-based strategies: A typology of object marking, Studies in Language 32/1, 1-32. Kittilä, Seppo, Jussi Ylikoski, Katja Västi, eds., (2011): Case Animacy and Semantic Roles. Typological Studies in Language 99. Amsterdam/Philadelphia. John Benjamins. Leonetti, Manuel (2004): Specificity and differential object marking in Spanish. Catalan Journal of Linguistics 3, 75-114 [revised version of: Specificity and object marking: the case of Spanish a. In: K. von Heusinger & G.A. Kaiser (eds.). Proceedings of the Workshop "Semantic and Syntactic Aspects of Specificity in Romance Languages". Arbeitspapier 113. Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Constance 2003, 67-101]. *Invited speakers* (alphabetically): Miriam Butt Eleanor Coghill Dmitriy Ganenkov Alice Harris Klaus von Heusinger Axel Holvoet Peter Hook Tuomas Huumo Giorgio Iemmolo Seppo Kittilä and Jussi Ylikoski Marian Klamer Andrej Malchukov Chantal Melis Sergey Say *Abstracts* Abstracts are invited for the workshop session. Each presentation has 20 minutes followed by 10 minutes of discussion. Only one paper per participant is admitted. Abstracts should be anonymous, maximally of one page in length, excluding references and examples (in .doc, .pdf or .docx). Abstracts should be submitted per e-mail at DAM.2014 at uni-konstanz.de. The URL of the workshop is: http://www.uni-konstanz.de/serzants/DAM_2014/ *The deadline for the submission of the abstract is: November 10, 2013.** **Applicants will be notified of abstract acceptance by: November 20, 2013.** * All contributors will be invited to submit a version of their paper to be published in a peer-reviewed conference follow-up volume. Further details may be found on the webpage: http://www.uni-konstanz.de/serzants/DAM_2014/. Workshop organizers, Ilja Ser ž ant & Alena Witzlack-Makarevich -- Ilja A. Seržant, postdoc University of Konstanz Department of Linguistics Zukunftskolleg, Box 216 D-78457 KONSTANZ URL: http://www.uni-konstanz.de/serzants/ Tel.: +49 753 188 5672 -------------- 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 katia.golovko at gmail.com Mon Jul 8 22:04:54 2013 From: katia.golovko at gmail.com (katia golovko) Date: Tue, 9 Jul 2013 00:04:54 +0200 Subject: Fwd: CALL: COPULAS In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Apologies for cross-posting *Workshop on Copulas* University of Bologna, Italy. This is a preliminary call for papers to be presented at the workshop on copulas taking place at the University of Bologna, Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures (LILEC) on March 13th, 2014. The aim of this workshop is to gather together scholars and students studying copulas from all domains of linguistic analysis. We have adopted a broad definition of copula including attributive, ascriptive, identificational, equative, locative and existential sentences. Contributions may address one or more of the following subjects: - Copular taxonomy; - The semantics of copular items; - Dropping, omission deletion or absence of copulas; - Copula variation due to semantic and/or syntactic factors; - Copulas in pidgin and creoles; - Emergence of copular items - the copula cycle; - Copulas in first and second language acquisition; - Micro-variation: comparative studies of the copular systems in typologically related languages, languages pertaining to the same dialect cluster, or even in different registers of the same language; - Multi-copula systems; All papers will be allocated 20 minutes plus 10 minutes for discussion. Invited speakers: Alessandro Panunzi (University of Firenze) Andrea Moro (IUSS - Pavia) (to be confirmed) Abstracts should be no more than 500 words including title, main text and references (word count to be written at the bottom of your text). Please send your proposal as a PDF or Word file attached to an email containing your personal information (name, surname and affiliation). By September 15th, please send your expression of interest or any other queries to: Katia Golovko ekaterina.golovko4 at unibo.it Maria Mazzoli tefra.tefra at gmail.com -- Katia Golovko via Olindo Guerrini, 17 40134 Bologna Italia -- Katia Golovko via Olindo Guerrini, 17 40134 Bologna Italia -------------- 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 Freek.VanDeVelde at arts.kuleuven.be Wed Jul 10 14:20:03 2013 From: Freek.VanDeVelde at arts.kuleuven.be (Freek Van de Velde) Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2013 14:20:03 +0000 Subject: Workshop at Evolang X Message-ID: Workshop "How Grammaticalization processes create grammar. From historical corpus data to agent-based models" at Evolang X, 14th-17th April 2014 in Vienna (http://evolangx.univie.ac.at/) Workshop website: http://www.emergent-languages.org/?page_id=327 Convenors: Luc Steels ICREA, Institute for Evolutionary Biology (UPF-CSIC), Barcelona Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris Freek Van de Velde University of Leuven / FWO Remi van Trijp Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris Description Recently the scientific study of language origins and evolution has seen three important breakthroughs. First, a growing number of corpora of historical language data has become available. Although initially these corpora have been used to examine surface features only (for example the frequency and distribution of word occurrences), advances in statistical language processing now allow for the thorough examination of aspects of grammar, for example, how syntactic structure has progressively arisen in the history of Indo-European languages or how constructional choices have undergone change (e.g. Krug 2000; Bybee 2010; Sommerer 2010; Van de Velde 2010; Traugott & Trousdale, forthc.; Hilpert & Gries, ms.). Second, agent-based models of the cognitive and cultural processes underlying the emergence and evolution of language have made a significant leap forward by using sophisticated, and therefore more realistic, representations of grammar and language processing (e.g. Van Trijp 2012; Beuls & Steels 2013), so that we can now go way beyond the lexicon-oriented experiments characteristic for the field a decade ago. Finally, selectionist theorizing, which has given such tremendous power to evolutionary biology, is being applied increasingly to understand language evolution at the cultural level (Croft 2000; Ritt 2004; Mufwene 2008; Rosenbach et al. 2008; Landsbergen et al. 2010; Steels 2011). Researchers are beginning to look more closely at what selectionist criteria could drive the origins and change in grammatical paradigms and how new language strategies could arise through exaptation, recombination or mutation of existing strategies. The selectionist criteria are primarily based on achieving enough expressive power, maximizing communicative success, and minimizing cognitive effort (Van Trijp 2013). The confluence of these three trends is beginning to give us sophisticated agent-based models which are empirically grounded in real corpus data and framed in a well-established theory of cultural evolution, thus leading to comprehensive scientific models of the grammaticalization processes underlying language emergence and evolution. All this is tremendously exciting. The goal of this workshop is to alert the community of researchers in language evolution to this important development and to show concrete research achievements demonstrating the current state of the art. It will act as a forum for exchanging tools and it will inquire what kind of open problems might be amenable to this approach, given the currently available data and the state of the art in computational linguistics tools for agent-based modeling. The workshop is intended to enable a deeper dialog between two communities (historical linguistics and computational linguistics) so that we can productively combine the very long tradition of empirical research from historical linguistics with the rigorous formalization and validation through simulation as practiced in agent-based modeling. The workshop will as much as possible be based on real case studies. For example, how can we explain the current messy state of the German article system, given that old High German had a much clearer system? (Van Trijp 2013) Is this development based on random drift or are there selectionist forces at work? How can we explain that Indo-European languages progressively developed a rich constituent structure with an increasing number of syntactic categories, a gradual incorporation of 'floating' words into phrases, and a loss of grammatical agreement? (Van de Velde 2009)? How can we explain the emergence of quantifiers out of adjectives? How can we explain the rise of a case system (Beuls & Steels 2013). General research questions that are to be addressed: 1. What are the processes that cause variation in populations of speakers? 2. What are the processes that select variants to become dominant in a speech community? 3. How do language strategies give rise to language systems? 4. Which cognitive functions must the brain support in order to implement language strategies? 5. What are good tools for doing empirically driven agent-based modeling? Call for papers: We invite contributions (10' talk + 5' discussion) to one of the following three sessions in the workshop: Session I. Case studies: historical data of emergence and evolution of grammatical phenomena and concrete agent-based models, or steps towards them. Session II. Tools: What is the state of the art for historical linguistics corpora and tools extracting trends in grammatical evolution? What tools are available for building realistic agent-based models of grammaticalization? Session III. Cultural evolution theory: Which results from theoretical research in evolutionary biology can be exapted to advance cultural evolutionary linguistics? An extended abstract of 4 pages / 1500 words should be sent to: info at fcg-net.org. Accepted abstracts will be published in the conference proceedings. Deadline for submission of abstracts: 1 October 2013 Notification of acceptance: 4 November 2013 References: Beuls, Katrien & Luc Steels. 2013. 'Agent-based models of strategies for the emergence and evolution of grammatical agreement'. PLoS ONE 8(3), e58960. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0058960. Bybee, Joan L. 2010. Language, Usage and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Croft, William. 2000. Explaining language change. An evolutionary approach. Harlow: Longman. Hilpert, Martin & Stefan Th, Gries. Manuscript. 'Quantitative approaches to diachronic corpus linguistics'. In: Merja Kytö & Päivi Pahta (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of English historical linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Krug, Manfred. 2000. Emerging English modals: a corpus-based study of grammaticalization. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Landsbergen, Frank, Robert Lachlan, Carel ten Cate & Arie Verhagen. 'A cultural evolutionary model of patterns in semantic change'. Linguistics 48: 363-390. Ritt, Nikolaus. 2004. Selfish Sounds. A Darwinian Approach to Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosenbach, Anette. 2008. 'Language Change as Cultural Evolution: Evolutionary Approaches to Language Change'. In: Regine Eckardt, Gerhard Jäger and Tonjes Veenstra (eds.), Variation, Selection, Development. Probing the Evolutionary Model of Language Chang. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 23-72. Sommerer, Lotte. 2011. 'Old English se: from demonstrative to article. A usage-based study of nominal determination and category emergence'. PhD thesis, University of Vienna. Steels, Luc. 2011. 'Modeling the cultural evolution of language'. Physics of Life Review 8: 339-356. Traugott, Elizabeth & Graeme Trousdale. Forthcoming. Constructionalization and constructional change. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Van de Velde, Freek. 2009. De nominale constituent. Structuur en geschiedenis. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Van de Velde, Freek. 2010. 'The emergence of the determiner in the Dutch NP'. Linguistics 48: 263-299. Van Trijp, Remi. 2012. 'Not as awful as it seems: explaining German case through computational experiments in fluid construction grammar. In: Proceedings of the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 829-839. Van Trijp, Remi. 2013. 'Linguistic assessment criteria for explaining language change: a case study on syncretism in German definite articles'. Language Dynamics and Change 3(1): 105-132. Freek Van de Velde http://wwwling.arts.kuleuven.be/qlvl/freek.htm -------------- 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 annaram at unipv.it Tue Jul 2 19:48:48 2013 From: annaram at unipv.it (Anna Giacalone) Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2013 21:48:48 +0200 Subject: book announcement Message-ID: Dear List members, the following book has been just published by Benjamins [SLCS 133]: Synchrony and Diachrony A dynamic interface Edited by Anna Giacalone Ramat, Caterina Mauri and Piera Molinelli University of Pavia / University of Bergamo-- Please see the enclosed flier for more details Anna Giacalone Ramat Anna Giacalone Ramat Professore Emerito Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici- Sezione di Linguistica teorica e applicata Strada Nuova 65, 27100 PAVIA telef.: +39-0382-984484 fax: +39-0382-984487 annaram at unipv.it http://lettere.unipv.it/diplinguistica/docenti.php?&id=96 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: flier slcs.133.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 674808 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Histling-l mailing list Histling-l at mailman.rice.edu https://mailman.rice.edu/mailman/listinfo/histling-l From ilja.serzants at uni-konstanz.de Thu Jul 4 16:37:38 2013 From: ilja.serzants at uni-konstanz.de (Ilja Serzants) Date: Thu, 4 Jul 2013 18:37:38 +0200 Subject: CfP: The Diachronic Typology of Differential Argument Marking / University of Konstanz, April 5-6, 2014 Message-ID: - apologizes for multiple posting - *CALL FOR PAPERS* /E-mail:/ DAM.2014 at uni-konstanz.de. /URL:/ http://www.uni-konstanz.de/serzants/DAM_2014/ Workshop/Conference: *The Diachronic Typology of Differential Argument Marking, *University of Konstanz, April 5-6, 2014 Differential marking of grammatical relations has been the topic of a number of investigations. However, no large-scale, comprehensive study of the historical development of the differential case-marking strategies has been carried out yet. The present workshop aims at filling this gap. Its task is to uncover the multi-factorial mechanisms leading to the rise of the differential argument marking, more specifically, to the Differential Subject- (DSM) and the Differential Object Marking (DOM). The phenomenon of the DOM/DSM is typically conditioned various factors such as definiteness and/or specificity, or discourse prominence, cf. Aissen (2003), Bossong (1998), von Heusinger and Kaiser (2007), Kittil? (2006), Kittil? et al. (2011), Leonetti (2004), just to mention some. Cross-linguistically, it may be differently realized formally and triggered by a variety of conditions (cf. de Hoop and de Swart 2008). Beside DOM/DSM based on formal or semantic properties of the respective NP, it may also be governed by the tense or aspectual properties of the verb phrase or the clause type (de Hoop, forthc.). The DSM/DOM phenomena are also sensitive to the thematic roles of the respective arguments (e.g., rather to agents and less to experiencers), and their inherent properties. Thus DSM often involves the marking of highly agentive subjects rather than atypical ones (cf. de Hoop and Malchukov 2007, de Hoop and de Swart 2008), in order to contrast both arguments of a transitive clause. Striking about the DOM/DSM phenomena is the fact that the aforementioned distinctions are often morphologically expressed by assigning distinct cases, quasi-allomorph case affixes or prepositions to encode these contrasts. From the typological research we know, however, that the primary function of case is to encode relations among constituents of a clause (Blake 2001), including the thematic roles, whereas such NP properties as definiteness/specificity/non-referentiality, animacy, and discursive prominence are typically encoded by other means, e.g., by determiners primarily. We ask how this atypical functional extension of the case-related morphological inventory emerges historically. We are not only interested in the functional history of the phenomenon; syntactic changes that lead to syntactically uniform behaviour of both alternating markings is equally interesting and unstudied. Thus, at an early developmental stage, the assignment of different cases may have impact on the syntactic properties of that argument, cf. (1) from Russian: (1) / Ja vypil sok / sok-a/ I:NOM drink:PAST juice:ACC(=NOM) / juice-GEN 'I drank up the jouce / I drank (some) juice.' The clause in (1), if uttered with the object NP sok, can be passivized, while with the (partitive) genitive-marked NP sok-a the passivization and thereby the promotion of the object NP into the subject is not available. Essentially, while our knowledge on functional semantics of DOM/DSM and its possible integration into different approaches to grammar has considerably increased in the last decades, there has not been done much research on how DOM/DSM arise across languages and what are the triggering mechanisms for it. The whole process involving a non-trivial shift in the domain of application from the functional domain of a "typical" case, i.e. from encoding relations among constituents, into, e.g., the domain of definiteness or specificity, ontological classes or aspectually relevant opposition (e.g., partitive vs. total in Finnic), has not been extensively studied yet. We invite contributions relating to any aspect of the DSM/DOM diachrony from any perspective. We emphasize that diachrony does not necessarily imply reconstructions of proto-stages of a language or involvement of ancient texts. Diachronic changes can be observed on a quasi-synchronic level, e.g., between the conservative and colloquial style of a present day language. Moreover, such quasi-synchronic changes can often be described and analyzed even at a more fine-grained level and, hence, provide for more insights on what kind of diachronic processes DAM systems typically undergo. We welcome studies dealing with macro-changes (e.g., with the rise or demise of DAM) as well as studies treating micro-changes (e.g., changes in the functional semantics of a particular DAM system). Possible questions that might be addressed includes (but are not confined to) the following: - What is the etymology of the morphological markers that gave rise to DOM/DSM? - How to model the functional shift of a prototypical case marker into a DSM/DOM marker with the respective (e.g., determiner-like) semantics in the particular case? - How to model the morphosyntactic development from a solid, valence-driven case frame of a predicate into a sort of labile predicate with a DSM/DOM-driven case frame? - What kinds of morphosyntactic processes enable overriding or loosening the case frame? - What kind of syntactic changes accompany rise, development and demise of DAM? - Are the animacy-driven, definiteness-driven, information-structure-driven DOM/DSM phenomena diachronically interrelated with regard to their relative chronology? Which function is typically acquired first? - What is the relative chronology of the lexical input restrictions in the rise of DOM/DSM? Which NP types acquire DOM/DSM first and which last? - How can DOM/DSM phenomena be transferred or copied via language contact? - How do DOM/DSM disappear in favor of a straightforward government? - Can DOM/DSM be regarded as just transitional stages in a development, whereby some new, productive case-marking pattern replaces the old one (or the lack thereof) and develops into a canonical object or subject case-marking, respectively, gradually affecting more and more NP types? References Aissen, Judith (2003): Differential Object marking: Iconicity vs. Economy. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 21, 435-448. Blake, Barry J. (2001): Case. Cambridge textbooks in linguistics. 2nd edition. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Bossong, G. (1998): Le marquage diff?rentiel de l'objet dans les langues d'Europe. In: Feuillet, J. (ed.): Actance et Valence dans les Language de l'Europe. Berlin, New York : Mouton de Gryuter, 193-258. de Hoop, Helen, forthc.: The rise of animacy based differential subject marking in Dutch. In: Ser?ant, I. A. and L. Kulikov (eds.), The The Diachronic Typology of Non-canonical Subjects. SLCS. Amsterdam/Philadelphia. John Benjamins. de Hoop, Helen and Malchukov, Andrej (2007): On fluid differential case marking: a bidirectional OT account. Lingua 117, 1636-1656. de Hoop, Helen and Peter de Swart eds., (2008): Differential subject marking. Dordrecht: Springer. von Heusinger, Klaus and Georg A. Kaiser (2007): Differential Object Marking and the lexical semantics of verbs in Spanish. In: Kaiser, G.A. and M. Leonetti (eds.): Proceedings of the Workshop "Definiteness, Specificity and Animacy in Ibero-Romance Languages". Universit?t Constance (Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft. Arbeitspapier 122), 85-110. Kittil?, Seppo T. (2006): Object-, animacy- and role-based strategies: A typology of object marking, Studies in Language 32/1, 1-32. Kittil?, Seppo, Jussi Ylikoski, Katja V?sti, eds., (2011): Case Animacy and Semantic Roles. Typological Studies in Language 99. Amsterdam/Philadelphia. John Benjamins. Leonetti, Manuel (2004): Specificity and differential object marking in Spanish. Catalan Journal of Linguistics 3, 75-114 [revised version of: Specificity and object marking: the case of Spanish a. In: K. von Heusinger & G.A. Kaiser (eds.). Proceedings of the Workshop "Semantic and Syntactic Aspects of Specificity in Romance Languages". Arbeitspapier 113. Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft, Universit?t Constance 2003, 67-101]. *Invited speakers* (alphabetically): Miriam Butt Eleanor Coghill Dmitriy Ganenkov Alice Harris Klaus von Heusinger Axel Holvoet Peter Hook Tuomas Huumo Giorgio Iemmolo Seppo Kittil? and Jussi Ylikoski Marian Klamer Andrej Malchukov Chantal Melis Sergey Say *Abstracts* Abstracts are invited for the workshop session. Each presentation has 20 minutes followed by 10 minutes of discussion. Only one paper per participant is admitted. Abstracts should be anonymous, maximally of one page in length, excluding references and examples (in .doc, .pdf or .docx). Abstracts should be submitted per e-mail at DAM.2014 at uni-konstanz.de. The URL of the workshop is: http://www.uni-konstanz.de/serzants/DAM_2014/ *The deadline for the submission of the abstract is: November 10, 2013.** **Applicants will be notified of abstract acceptance by: November 20, 2013.** * All contributors will be invited to submit a version of their paper to be published in a peer-reviewed conference follow-up volume. Further details may be found on the webpage: http://www.uni-konstanz.de/serzants/DAM_2014/. Workshop organizers, Ilja Ser ? ant & Alena Witzlack-Makarevich -- Ilja A. Ser?ant, postdoc University of Konstanz Department of Linguistics Zukunftskolleg, Box 216 D-78457 KONSTANZ URL: http://www.uni-konstanz.de/serzants/ Tel.: +49 753 188 5672 -------------- 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 katia.golovko at gmail.com Mon Jul 8 22:04:54 2013 From: katia.golovko at gmail.com (katia golovko) Date: Tue, 9 Jul 2013 00:04:54 +0200 Subject: Fwd: CALL: COPULAS In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Apologies for cross-posting *Workshop on Copulas* University of Bologna, Italy. This is a preliminary call for papers to be presented at the workshop on copulas taking place at the University of Bologna, Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures (LILEC) on March 13th, 2014. The aim of this workshop is to gather together scholars and students studying copulas from all domains of linguistic analysis. We have adopted a broad definition of copula including attributive, ascriptive, identificational, equative, locative and existential sentences. Contributions may address one or more of the following subjects: - Copular taxonomy; - The semantics of copular items; - Dropping, omission deletion or absence of copulas; - Copula variation due to semantic and/or syntactic factors; - Copulas in pidgin and creoles; - Emergence of copular items - the copula cycle; - Copulas in first and second language acquisition; - Micro-variation: comparative studies of the copular systems in typologically related languages, languages pertaining to the same dialect cluster, or even in different registers of the same language; - Multi-copula systems; All papers will be allocated 20 minutes plus 10 minutes for discussion. Invited speakers: Alessandro Panunzi (University of Firenze) Andrea Moro (IUSS - Pavia) (to be confirmed) Abstracts should be no more than 500 words including title, main text and references (word count to be written at the bottom of your text). Please send your proposal as a PDF or Word file attached to an email containing your personal information (name, surname and affiliation). By September 15th, please send your expression of interest or any other queries to: Katia Golovko ekaterina.golovko4 at unibo.it Maria Mazzoli tefra.tefra at gmail.com -- Katia Golovko via Olindo Guerrini, 17 40134 Bologna Italia -- Katia Golovko via Olindo Guerrini, 17 40134 Bologna Italia -------------- 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 Freek.VanDeVelde at arts.kuleuven.be Wed Jul 10 14:20:03 2013 From: Freek.VanDeVelde at arts.kuleuven.be (Freek Van de Velde) Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2013 14:20:03 +0000 Subject: Workshop at Evolang X Message-ID: Workshop "How Grammaticalization processes create grammar. From historical corpus data to agent-based models" at Evolang X, 14th-17th April 2014 in Vienna (http://evolangx.univie.ac.at/) Workshop website: http://www.emergent-languages.org/?page_id=327 Convenors: Luc Steels ICREA, Institute for Evolutionary Biology (UPF-CSIC), Barcelona Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris Freek Van de Velde University of Leuven / FWO Remi van Trijp Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris Description Recently the scientific study of language origins and evolution has seen three important breakthroughs. First, a growing number of corpora of historical language data has become available. Although initially these corpora have been used to examine surface features only (for example the frequency and distribution of word occurrences), advances in statistical language processing now allow for the thorough examination of aspects of grammar, for example, how syntactic structure has progressively arisen in the history of Indo-European languages or how constructional choices have undergone change (e.g. Krug 2000; Bybee 2010; Sommerer 2010; Van de Velde 2010; Traugott & Trousdale, forthc.; Hilpert & Gries, ms.). Second, agent-based models of the cognitive and cultural processes underlying the emergence and evolution of language have made a significant leap forward by using sophisticated, and therefore more realistic, representations of grammar and language processing (e.g. Van Trijp 2012; Beuls & Steels 2013), so that we can now go way beyond the lexicon-oriented experiments characteristic for the field a decade ago. Finally, selectionist theorizing, which has given such tremendous power to evolutionary biology, is being applied increasingly to understand language evolution at the cultural level (Croft 2000; Ritt 2004; Mufwene 2008; Rosenbach et al. 2008; Landsbergen et al. 2010; Steels 2011). Researchers are beginning to look more closely at what selectionist criteria could drive the origins and change in grammatical paradigms and how new language strategies could arise through exaptation, recombination or mutation of existing strategies. The selectionist criteria are primarily based on achieving enough expressive power, maximizing communicative success, and minimizing cognitive effort (Van Trijp 2013). The confluence of these three trends is beginning to give us sophisticated agent-based models which are empirically grounded in real corpus data and framed in a well-established theory of cultural evolution, thus leading to comprehensive scientific models of the grammaticalization processes underlying language emergence and evolution. All this is tremendously exciting. The goal of this workshop is to alert the community of researchers in language evolution to this important development and to show concrete research achievements demonstrating the current state of the art. It will act as a forum for exchanging tools and it will inquire what kind of open problems might be amenable to this approach, given the currently available data and the state of the art in computational linguistics tools for agent-based modeling. The workshop is intended to enable a deeper dialog between two communities (historical linguistics and computational linguistics) so that we can productively combine the very long tradition of empirical research from historical linguistics with the rigorous formalization and validation through simulation as practiced in agent-based modeling. The workshop will as much as possible be based on real case studies. For example, how can we explain the current messy state of the German article system, given that old High German had a much clearer system? (Van Trijp 2013) Is this development based on random drift or are there selectionist forces at work? How can we explain that Indo-European languages progressively developed a rich constituent structure with an increasing number of syntactic categories, a gradual incorporation of 'floating' words into phrases, and a loss of grammatical agreement? (Van de Velde 2009)? How can we explain the emergence of quantifiers out of adjectives? How can we explain the rise of a case system (Beuls & Steels 2013). General research questions that are to be addressed: 1. What are the processes that cause variation in populations of speakers? 2. What are the processes that select variants to become dominant in a speech community? 3. How do language strategies give rise to language systems? 4. Which cognitive functions must the brain support in order to implement language strategies? 5. What are good tools for doing empirically driven agent-based modeling? Call for papers: We invite contributions (10' talk + 5' discussion) to one of the following three sessions in the workshop: Session I. Case studies: historical data of emergence and evolution of grammatical phenomena and concrete agent-based models, or steps towards them. Session II. Tools: What is the state of the art for historical linguistics corpora and tools extracting trends in grammatical evolution? What tools are available for building realistic agent-based models of grammaticalization? Session III. Cultural evolution theory: Which results from theoretical research in evolutionary biology can be exapted to advance cultural evolutionary linguistics? An extended abstract of 4 pages / 1500 words should be sent to: info at fcg-net.org. Accepted abstracts will be published in the conference proceedings. Deadline for submission of abstracts: 1 October 2013 Notification of acceptance: 4 November 2013 References: Beuls, Katrien & Luc Steels. 2013. 'Agent-based models of strategies for the emergence and evolution of grammatical agreement'. PLoS ONE 8(3), e58960. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0058960. Bybee, Joan L. 2010. Language, Usage and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Croft, William. 2000. Explaining language change. An evolutionary approach. Harlow: Longman. Hilpert, Martin & Stefan Th, Gries. Manuscript. 'Quantitative approaches to diachronic corpus linguistics'. In: Merja Kyt? & P?ivi Pahta (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of English historical linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Krug, Manfred. 2000. Emerging English modals: a corpus-based study of grammaticalization. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Landsbergen, Frank, Robert Lachlan, Carel ten Cate & Arie Verhagen. 'A cultural evolutionary model of patterns in semantic change'. Linguistics 48: 363-390. Ritt, Nikolaus. 2004. Selfish Sounds. A Darwinian Approach to Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosenbach, Anette. 2008. 'Language Change as Cultural Evolution: Evolutionary Approaches to Language Change'. In: Regine Eckardt, Gerhard J?ger and Tonjes Veenstra (eds.), Variation, Selection, Development. Probing the Evolutionary Model of Language Chang. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 23-72. Sommerer, Lotte. 2011. 'Old English se: from demonstrative to article. A usage-based study of nominal determination and category emergence'. PhD thesis, University of Vienna. Steels, Luc. 2011. 'Modeling the cultural evolution of language'. Physics of Life Review 8: 339-356. Traugott, Elizabeth & Graeme Trousdale. Forthcoming. Constructionalization and constructional change. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Van de Velde, Freek. 2009. De nominale constituent. Structuur en geschiedenis. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Van de Velde, Freek. 2010. 'The emergence of the determiner in the Dutch NP'. Linguistics 48: 263-299. Van Trijp, Remi. 2012. 'Not as awful as it seems: explaining German case through computational experiments in fluid construction grammar. In: Proceedings of the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 829-839. Van Trijp, Remi. 2013. 'Linguistic assessment criteria for explaining language change: a case study on syncretism in German definite articles'. Language Dynamics and Change 3(1): 105-132. Freek Van de Velde http://wwwling.arts.kuleuven.be/qlvl/freek.htm -------------- 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