Pre-Call: Cross-linguistic and language-internal variation in text and speech

[Bernhard Waelchli]

Cross-linguistic and language-internal variation in text and speech:
focus on the joint analysis of multiple characteristics

Pre-call for a workshop
(A pre-call is an early announcement that there will be a call for 
papers, but that it is still too early to submit abstracts)

Freiburg (D), FRIAS (Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies)
February 9-11, 2o11 (not 2o1o!!!)
organized by Benedikt Szmrecsanyi (Freiburg) and Bernhard Wälchli (Bern)
http://www.frias.uni-freiburg.de/lang_and_lit/veranstaltungen/variation-lili

Invited speakers:   
* Balthasar Bickel (Leipzig) 
* Karen Corrigan (Newcastle)   
* Michael Cysouw (München) 
* Östen Dahl (Stockholm)   
* Dirk Geeraerts (Leuven)   
* Jack Grieve (Leuven)   
* Peter Grzybek (Graz)  
* Wilbert Heeringa (Amsterdam)  
* Reinhard Köhler (Trier)   
* William Kretzschmar (Georgia)

This workshop seeks to bring together typologists, dialectologists and 
dialectometricians, register analysts, and quantitative linguists to 
discuss approaches to cross-linguistic and language-internal diversity that

* are based on the study of corpora of texts or speech of different 
languages, different dialects or different registers (conversation, 
narratives including retold stories, newspaper prose, parallel texts, 
etc.) - not on reference grammar material, questionnaire data, dialect 
atlases, or elicitation;

* are concerned with the joint (or: aggregate) analysis of multiple 
characteristics or features. These multiple characteristics may be 
frequency counts and/or distributional data with low levels of data 
reduction, but not binary features or discrete features with few types;

* marshal some sort of quantitative analysis technique to see the wood 
for the trees. Such techniques may involve data mining in the broadest 
sense, dimension reduction techniques, taxonomy, index calculation, 
diagrammatic visualization methods (e.g. network diagrams), projections 
to geography, and so on.

The nature and number of characteristics is not limited in any way (the 
more the merrier). Functional and formal perspectives on phonetics, 
phonology, morphology, syntax, and the lexicon are all welcome, provided 
the features investigated can be extracted from texts or speech with 
minimal commitments to particular theories of grammar.

The workshop is intended as a platform to discuss appropriate analysis 
techniques and issues concerning the corpus-cum-aggregation endeavor, as 
well as its prospects. Owing to the interdisciplinary scope of the 
workshop, we welcome contributions (i) which have an interdisciplinary 
focus themselves, and (ii) which emphasize methodological aspects rather 
than the detailed discussions of results. The approaches presented 
should be applied to a particular set of corpora, and the abstract 
should spell out the methodology utilized.

For further information see
http://www.frias.uni-freiburg.de/lang_and_lit/veranstaltungen/variation-lili