Call for Participation: Creating Infrastructure for Canonical Typology

[Anna Kibort]

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

Creating Infrastructure For Canonical Typology
January 9 - 10, 2009

Conference hosted by the Surrey Morphology Group
and Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

There is a growing movement within linguistics to promote the use of
ontologies for linguistic description. However, differences in terminology
and underlying logic are major stumbling blocks. One way of addressing 
these problems is to adopt the canonical approach to typology 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. A two-day international seminar is 
being held at Surrey in January 2009, addressing the issues relevant for 
the creation of an ontology for Canonical Typology in the form of a 
Community of Practice Extension (COPE) within the General Ontology for 
Linguistic Description (GOLD). It brings together computational linguists, 
fieldworkers and typologists, as well as researchers working specifically 
on ontologies.

Registration for the conference is now open online at:
http://www.ias.surrey.ac.uk/workshops/typology/index.php
Everyone who wishes to attend the meeting must register, using the online
form, *no later than 10 December 2008*.

A small number of bursaries is available to subsidise travel within the UK
for postgraduate student participants. Anyone wishing to be considered for 
a student bursary should send a one-page letter of application to Mrs 
Mirela Dumic <m.dumic at surrey.ac.uk> by the end of 7 December 2008.

PROGRAMME

January 9, 2009

    9.00-10.00   Meeting of the LTRC Group
   10:00-10:30   Refreshments and arrival

Session A

   10:30-10:45   Introduction  Dunstan Brown (Surrey)
   10:45-11:30   'Canonical morphosyntactic features'  Grev Corbett 
(Surrey)
   11:30-12:30   'Towards a multidimensional typology of nominal
classification'  Frank Seifart (Regensburg)
   12:30-1:15    Lunch

Session B

   1:15-2:00   'Refining the canonical characterization of the passive' 
Anna Siewierska (Lancaster)
   2:00-3:00   'Rare but useful: the canons 'direct' and 'indirect' in
reported speech typology'  Nicholas Evans (ANU)
   3:00-3:30   Coffee break
   3:30-4:15   'Canonical typology: the case of reflexivization'  Martin
Everaert (Utrecht)
   4:15-5:00   'Towards a typology of finiteness: a canonical approach'
Irina Nikolaeva (SOAS)


January 10, 2009

Session A

    9:00-9:45    'On clitics and canons'  Andrew Spencer (Essex) and Ana 
Luis (Coimbra)
    9:45-10:30   'Canonical typology of person agreement: evidence from
signed languages'  Adam Schombri (UCL) and Kearsy Cormier (UCL)
   10:30-11:00   Coffee break
   11:00-11:45   'Canons and the Possession-Modification Scale'  Irina
Nikolaeva (SOAS) and Andrew Spencer (Essex)
   11:45-12:30   'Infrastructure requires a foundation: a base for the 
canons of negation'  Oliver Bond (SOAS)
   12:30-1:30    Lunch

Session B

   1:30-2:15   'From interlinearized glossing to standard annotation'
Dorothee Beermann Hellan (Trondheim)
   2:15-3:00   'Corpus informed approach to Canonical Typology'  Jiajin XU
(Lancaster)
   3:00-3:15   Coffee break
   3:15-4:00   'An extensible design for linguistic survey databases' 
Alexis Dimitriadis (Utrecht)
   4:00-5:00   'Using canonical typology to achieve e-Linguistics'  Scott
Farrar (Washington)
   5:00        Concluding Remarks