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

[Bernhard Waelchli]

(apologies for cross-postings)

CROSS-LINGUISTIC AND LANGUAGE-INTERNAL VARIATION IN TEXT AND SPEECH:
FOCUS ON THE JOINT ANALYSIS OF MULTIPLE CHARACTERISTICS

CALL FOR PAPERS

Freiburg (Germany), FRIAS (Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies)
February 9-11, 2011
Workshop organized by Benedikt Szmrecsanyi (Freiburg) and Bernhard 
Wälchli (Bern)

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.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Aside from the talks by the invited speakers there will be time for 
about ten more presentations -- we want to make sure that there is ample 
time for discussion throughout the workshop. Given the limited number of 
additional slots, collaborative talks are encouraged. We are planning to 
put together a focussed Workshop volume, to which all speakers will be 
kindly requested to contribute, in Walter de Gruyter's peer-reviewed 
Linguae et Litterae series.

Deadline 15.8.2010

Send an abstract of maximally one page A4 (optionally with maximally 
another page with examples, figures, or other additional matter) in a 
PDF-File electronically to both organizers
 
bszm AT frias uni-freiburg de
bernhard waelchli AT isw unibe ch

Notification by 1.10.2010

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

APOLOGIES FOR PARTIAL OVERLAP WITH OTHER EVENTS
A first announcement of the workshop had been circulated on the 
Lingtyp-list in November 2009. We regret the temporal overlap with the 
Conference on Electronic Grammaticography 
(http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/conference/11-grammaticography2011) in 
Leipzig 11-12.2.2011 and the International Conference on Language 
Documentation and Conservation (http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ICLDC/2011/) at 
the University of Hawaii 11-13.2.2011.
We will try to schedule papers related to issues of grammaticography and 
language documentation in the first part of our workshop.