Conference on Competing Motivations

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Info-CHILDES,

   Here is the call for papers for a conference on competing motivations in language to be held November 23-25 in Leipzig.

-- Brian MacWhinney, CMU

CALL FOR PAPERS FOR A

CONFERENCE  ON

COMPETING MOTIVATIONS

General

We invite papers on the role of competing motivations in the emergence and use of linguistic structures from linguists, psychologists, and others working in related fields.

Time and place

The three-day conference will take place NOVEMBER 23-25  (TUESDAY-THURSDAY) 2010 at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Organizers

The conference is organized by Andrej Malchukov (Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology) and Edith Moravcsik (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (emerita)) and will be sponsored by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Program

In addition to the papers selected from abstracts and the introductory and closing talks by the conference organizers, there will be a number of invited presentations. So far we have the following on board:

      Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky

      Joan Bresnan

      Wolfgang Dressler

      John Du Bois

      Martin Haspelmath

      John A. Hawkins

      Bernd Heine

      Helen de Hoop

      Brian MacWhinney

      Gereon Müller

      Frederick Newmeyer

      Michael Tomasello

      
The conference website will post the schedule and other relevant information  in the Spring:

http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/conference/10-CompetingMotivations/index.html

Topics

Competing motivations is a topic coming in different guises in linguistics and related disciplines. In language typology, the concept of competing motivations was explicitly introduced by Du Bois (1985), and since then it has made its way into many contributions including typology textbooks (e.g. Croft 1990; 2003). Currently it is a common trend in functional typology to view the evolution of grammar as resulting from different partly converging but also potentially conflicting functional motivations. An approach to typology where competing motivations (“conflicting constraints”) have been accorded the status of a major theoretical concept is Optimality Theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004, Müller 2000). In OT, grammatical patterns are viewed as resulting from constraint interaction, and cross-linguistic variation is attributed to different rankings of constraints. A similar approach has been introduced in psycholinguistics under the name of Competition Model (Bates & MacWhinney 1989), which addressed the question of how different cues are weighted in language comprehension and language acquisition when the cues are in conflict.

        These three strands of research have not been totally independent from the start (e.g. OT was inspired by the work in psycholinguistics and cognitive sciences), and recently there have been further signs of the converging tendencies in these fields. On the one hand, with the rise of functional OT (Bresnan & Aissen 2002) conceptual differences of functional typology and OT (see Haspelmath 1999 for discussion) have been reduced, and some recent work explicitly tries to further integrate OT and functional typology (see, e.g., Malchukov 2005; de Hoop & Malchukov 2008). On the other hand, OT shows further convergence with psycholinguistic research, with the rise of OT semantics and bidirectional OT approaches that are concerned with comprehension optimization (de Hoop & Lamers 2006). John Hawkins’ work (2004 et passim) aiming to explain generalizations found in typological and psycholinguistic work in terms of a few general principles grounded in processing goes in the same direction. It seems that these new developments have overcome some of the problems of the early competing motivation approaches noted in the literature (Newmeyer 1998) and are opening new perspectives in the respective disciplines. It should also be noted that there is an increased awareness of the similarities of competing motivations models as practiced within linguistic disciplines and beyond (e.g., in psychological research).

        The goal of this conference is to bring together researchers from linguistics and other fields  that adopt the competing motivation approach in one form or other another, and to promote further integration and cross-fertilization between them. Topics to be addressed include but are not limited to the following:

·      application of the competing motivation approach to individual languages and cross-linguistically;

·      application of competition models in psycholinguistic research (both language comprehension and language production);

·      theoretical questions such as:

·      What motivations are at work in given domains?

·      What evidence is there for the existence and the weighting of the constraints?

·      What factors determine the weightings of the constraints?

·      How are competing motivations manifested synchronically and diachronically? (cf. Haspelmath’s (1999) notion of ‘diachronic adaptation’ and the research program of ‘evolutionary phonology’ advocated by Blevins (2004)).  

 

Submission of abstracts

(a)  Length: up to one page of text plus up to one page containing possible tables and references

(b)  Format:

 The abstract should include the title of the paper and the text of the abstract but not the author’s name or affiliation. The e-mail message to which it is attached should list the title, the author’s name, and the author’s affiliation. Abstracts will be evaluated anonymously.

Please send the message to both organizers at the following addresses:  

    malchukov at eva.mpg.de

    edith at uwm.edu

(c)   Deadline

The abstracts should reach us by WEDNESDAY, MARCH 31.

Submitters will be notified by FRIDAY, APRIL 30.

  

References

Bates, E., & MacWhinney, B. 1987. Competition, variation, and language learning. In B. MacWhinney (Ed.), Mechanisms of Language Acquisition,  157–193. Hillsdale, New Jersey; London: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Blevins, J. (2004). Evolutionary phonology: The emergence of sound patterns. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bresnan, J. and J. Aissen (2002). Optionality and functionality: Objections and refutations. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 20, 81–95.

Croft, W., 1990. Typology and universals. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Du Bois, J.A. 1985. “Competing motivations”. In: Haiman, J. (ed.) Iconicity in syntax.  343-366. Amsterdam: Benjamins,

Haspelmath, M. 1999. ‘Optimality and diachronic adaptation.’ Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 18.2: 180-205.

Hawkins, John A. 2004. Efficiency and complexity in grammars. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

de Hoop, H. and M. Lamers. 2006. Incremental distinguishability of subject and object. In L. Kulikov, A. L. Malchukov and P. de Swart  (eds.) Case, valency, and transitivity. Amsterdam, John Benjamins.

de Hoop, H. and A. Malchukov. 2008. Case-marking strategies. Linguistic Inquiry 39 565–587.

Malchukov, A., 2005. Case pattern splits, verb types, and construction competition. In M. Amberber & H. de Hoop (eds.) Competition and variation in natural languages: the case for case, 73-117. Elsevier, Amsterdam, etc.

Müller, Gereon. 2000.  Elemente der optimalitätstheoretischen Syntax. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag.

Prince, A. and P. Smolensky  (2004). Optimality Theory:constraint interaction in Generative Grammar. Oxford, Blackwell.

 

 

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