2nd CFP: Creating Infrastructure for Canonical Typology

[Anna Kibort]

SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS

Creating Infrastructure for Canonical Typology
9-10 January 2009
Conference hosted by the Surrey Morphology Group

Call deadline: 29 August 2008

Papers are invited for a two-day conference addressing issues relevant for the 
creation of an online infrastructure for Canonical Typology (Corbett 2005, 
2006).  Linguists' intuitions about what are particular instances of a 
phenomenon, such as a case or agreement, can differ because of differences in 
the choice of criteria which they take to be definitional. The canonical 
approach allows us to address these differences by taking defining properties 
and placing them in a multidimensional space. In this way, we can treat, for 
example, issues of whether particular constructions fit under the rubric 
'agreement' or 'case' as a matter of greater or lesser proximity to a canonical 
ideal. An ontology for this approach therefore requires a mapping out of the 
criteria that linguistic typologists use for defining linguistic constructs.

The Surrey Morphology Group proposes to bring together linguists from different 
perspectives to outline the issues relevant for the creation of an ontology for 
Canonical Typology in the form of a Community of Practice Extension (COPE) 
within the GOLD ontology for linguistics (Farrar and Langendoen 2003; see also: 
www.linguistics-ontology.org/gold.html). Contributions may address the 
following issues: the canonical criteria for defining different morphosyntactic 
features (case, gender, number, etc.); defining canonical criteria for 
syntax-morphology interaction (agreement, government, head, modifier, etc.); 
practical issues for the fieldworker; issues of computational implementation 
and reasoning. We invite papers on these and related topics from computational 
linguists, fieldworkers, typologists, as well as researchers working on 
ontologies.

Confirmed speakers:

- Nicholas Evans (Australian National University)
- Scott Farrar (University of Washington)
- Frank Seifart (Ruhr-Universität Bochum)

Anonymous abstracts (500 word maximum) should be sent as an attachment by 
e-mail to a.kibort at surrey.ac.uk by 29 August 2008, with contact information 
contained in the body of the message. Notification of acceptance will be sent 
by 31 October 2008. Any questions may also be sent to the above address.

The conference will be held at the University of Surrey, in Guildford, UK.
Guildford is a market town in the Green Belt surrounding London and is
located about 35 minutes by train from central London and within easy
reach of London's Heathrow and Gatwick airports.

References

Corbett, Greville G. 2005. The canonical approach in typology. In: Zygmunt 
Frajzyngier, Adam Hodges and David S. Rood (eds) Linguistic Diversity and 
Language Theories. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 25-49.

Corbett, Greville G. 2006. Agreement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Farrar, Scott and D. Terence Langendoen. 2003. A linguistic ontology for the 
Semantic Web. GLOT International 7(3), 97-100.