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<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Workshop "How Grammaticalization processes create grammar. From historical corpus data to agent-based models" at Evolang X, 14th-17th April 2014 in Vienna (<a href="http://evolangx.univie.ac.at/">http://evolangx.univie.ac.at/</a>)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Workshop website: <a href="http://www.emergent-languages.org/?page_id=327">
http://www.emergent-languages.org/?page_id=327</a> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Convenors:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Luc Steels<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">ICREA, Institute for Evolutionary Biology (UPF-CSIC), Barcelona Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Freek Van de Velde <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">University of Leuven / FWO<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Remi van Trijp<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Description<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Recently the scientific study of language origins and evolution has seen three important breakthroughs.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">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.).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">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).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">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.
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">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).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">General research questions that are to be addressed:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">1. What are the processes that cause variation in populations of speakers?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">2. What are the processes that select variants to become dominant in a speech community?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">3. How do language strategies give rise to language systems?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">4. Which cognitive functions must the brain support in order to implement language strategies?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">5. What are good tools for doing empirically driven agent-based modeling?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Call for papers:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">We invite contributions (10’ talk + 5’ discussion) to one of the following three sessions in the workshop:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Session I. Case studies: historical data of emergence and evolution of grammatical phenomena and concrete agent-based models, or steps towards them.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span lang="EN-US">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?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span lang="EN-US">Session III. Cultural evolution theory: Which results from theoretical research in evolutionary biology can be exapted to advance cultural evolutionary linguistics?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">An extended abstract of 4 pages / 1500 words should be sent to:
<a href="mailto:info@fcg-net.org">info@fcg-net.org</a>. Accepted abstracts will be published in the conference proceedings.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Deadline for submission of abstracts: 1 October 2013<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Notification of acceptance: 4 November 2013<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">References:<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Beuls, Katrien & Luc Steels. 2013. ‘Agent-based models of strategies for the emergence and evolution of grammatical agreement’.
<i>PLoS ONE</i> 8(3), e58960. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0058960.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Bybee, Joan L. 2010. <i>Language, Usage and Cognition</i>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Croft, William. 2000. <i>Explaining language change. An evolutionary approach</i>. Harlow: Longman.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Hilpert, Martin & Stefan Th, Gries. Manuscript. ‘Quantitative approaches to diachronic corpus linguistics’. In: Merja Kytö & Päivi Pahta (eds.),
<i>The Cambridge handbook of English historical linguistics</i>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Krug, Manfred. 2000. <i>Emerging English modals: a corpus-based study of grammaticalization</i>. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Landsbergen, Frank, Robert Lachlan, Carel ten Cate & Arie Verhagen. ‘A cultural evolutionary model of patterns in semantic change’.
<i>Linguistics</i> 48: 363-390.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Ritt, Nikolaus. 2004. <i>Selfish Sounds. A Darwinian Approach to Language Change</i>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Rosenbach, Anette. 2008. ‘Language Change as Cultural Evolution: Evolutionary Approaches to Language Change’. In: Regine Eckardt, Gerhard Jäger and Tonjes Veenstra (eds.),
<i>Variation, Selection, Development. Probing the Evolutionary Model of Language Chang</i>. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 23-72.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">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.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Steels, Luc. 2011. ‘Modeling the cultural evolution of language’.
<i>Physics of Life Review</i> 8: 339-356.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Traugott, Elizabeth & Graeme Trousdale. Forthcoming.
<i>Constructionalization and constructional change</i>. </span>Oxford: Oxford University Press.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Van de Velde, Freek. 2009. <i>De nominale constituent. Structuur en geschiedenis</i>. Leuven: Leuven University Press.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Van de Velde, Freek. 2010. 'The emergence of the determiner in the Dutch NP'.
<i>Linguistics</i> 48: 263-299.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Van Trijp, Remi. 2012. ‘Not as awful as it seems: explaining German case through computational experiments in fluid construction grammar. In:
<i>Proceedings of the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics</i>, 829-839.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Van Trijp, Remi. 2013. ‘Linguistic assessment criteria for explaining language change: a case study on syncretism in German definite articles’.
<i>Language Dynamics and Change</i> 3(1): 105-132.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.0pt;color:gray;mso-fareast-language:NL-BE">Freek Van de Velde<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;mso-fareast-language:NL-BE"><a href="http://wwwling.arts.kuleuven.be/qlvl/freek.htm"><span lang="EN-US" style="color:blue">http://wwwling.arts.kuleuven.be/qlvl/freek.htm</span></a></span><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:gray;mso-fareast-language:NL-BE">
<span lang="EN-US"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
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