[Lingtyp] Workshop call (DGfS 2020 Hamburg): “Universals in grammatical theorizing”

[Martin Haspelmath]

A workshop at the DGfS Annual Conference in Hamburg 
<https://www.zfs.uni-hamburg.de/dgfs2020/dgfs2020.html>, 2020 March 4-6 
(workshop coordinated by *Martin Haspelmath*):


    *Empirical consequences of universal claims in grammatical theorizing*

Universals of grammar have played a prominent role in general 
linguistics since the 1960s, but the connection between universal claims 
and empirical testing has often been tenuous. The great majority of 
linguists have always been working on a single language, but many 
linguists now strive to contribute to a larger enterprise. Thus, general 
claims have often been based initially on a few languages, or even just 
on one. As a result, the literature is full of proposals that have 
universal implications while we do not know to what extent they are true.

This workshop is intended to complement the conference theme of 
“linguistic diversity” by focusing on empirical evidence for linguistic 
uniformity, but from a variety of different perspectives. Evidence for 
universal claims can come from a wide range of sources, e.g.

  * large-scale worldwide *grammar-mining *(along the lines of
    Greenberg’s seminal work)

  * large *text collections*, either parallel (Cysouw & Wälchli 2007),
    or annotated in a parallel way (Universal Dependencies, Nivre et al.
    2016)

  * *artificial language learning experiments*, because these remove the
    conventionality that is associated with all naturally developed
    languages (e.g. Culbertson 2012)

  * the absence of a credible way of learning the relevant pattern
    (*poverty of the stimulus*, Lasnik & Lidz 2016)

  * *– the absence of published counterevidence *to well-known claims

This workshop would ideally bring together general linguists with 
diverse theoretical outlooks, so in addition to papers that discuss 
actual evidence for actual universal claims, it is also open to 
well-argued contributions questioning the idea that special evidence is 
needed for universal claims, and/or that justify the widespread practice 
of basing general claims on few languages.


    *Invited speakers*

  * Katharina Hartmann
    <https://www.uni-frankfurt.de/58779047/Hartmann_Syntax> (Goethe
    University Frankfurt am Main)

  * Stefan Müller <https://hpsg.hu-berlin.de/~stefan/> (Humboldt
    University Berlin)


    *Call for abstracts*

Abstracts for 30-minute oral presentations are invited (ca. 20 minutes 
presentation time + discussion). They should not exceed one page and can 
(but need not) be anonymous. Please submit your abstract to 
*universal.claims.theorizing at gmail.com*.

Abstract submission deadline: *31-Aug-2019*
Notification of acceptance: 6-Sep-2019

Workshop website:

https://research.uni-leipzig.de/unicodas/dgfs-workshop-universals-in-grammatical-theorizing-2020/

-- 
Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at shh.mpg.de)
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10	
D-07745 Jena
&
Leipzig University
Institut fuer Anglistik
IPF 141199
D-04081 Leipzig

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