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<b>Linguistic coding asymmetries, usage frequency and
informativeness <br>
(Workshop at <a
href="http://dgfs2017.uni-saarland.de/wordpress/">DGfS
conference Saarbrücken</a>, March 2017)</b></p>
<p>Since Roman Jakobson’s classical papers on morphological
markedness and on the zero sign, asymmetric morphosyntactic
patterns have been a core issue of grammar research. Across
languages we find recurrent asymmetric pairs such as
nominative/accusative, third/second person, singular/plural,
present/future, affirmative/negative, locative/ablative,
positive/comparative, adjective/abstract noun, verb/agent noun,
noncausative/causative, whose great systematicity is in need of
explanation.</p>
<p>Apart from the old markedness concept, there are two further
well-known explanatory approaches: On the one hand, the idea of
iconicity of complexity (known through John Haiman’s work, cf.
Downing & Stiebels 2012), which motivates the greater formal
complexity of semantically more complex forms; on the other
hand, the proposal that the asymmetries of coding should be
explained by usage frequency and informativeness: More frequent
forms (nominative, third person, singular, etc.) are more
predictable (less informative), and an efficient communication
system tends toward shorter or non-overt marking of these forms,
as was already noted by G.K. Zipf in the 1920s (Haspelmath
2008). This idea has more recently also been taken up by
psycholinguistics and corpus linguistics (e.g. Jaeger 2010).</p>
<p>However this is resolved, we still have no answer to the
question how the motivating factors are turned into linguistic
conventions. Zipf’s old idea that speakers shorte the most
frequent forms does not seem to be general enough, and the
precise diachronic mechanisms are still too little known.</p>
<p>Ideally, this workshop would bring together grammarians,
typologists, corpus linguists, psycholinguists and diachronic
linguists to exchange research results and address these issues
jointly.</p>
<p>Invited speaker:</p>
<p><strong>Gertraud Fenk-Oczlon</strong> (University of
Klagenfurt)</p>
<p>Organizer:<br>
<strong>Martin Haspelmath</strong> (MPI-SHH Jena & Leipzig
U)</p>
<p>Abstract reading committee:<br>
<strong>Holger Diessel</strong> (University of Jena)<br>
<strong>Sander Lestrade</strong> (RU Nijmegen)<br>
<strong>Damaris Nübling</strong> (University of Mainz)<br>
<strong>Elke Ronneberger-Sibold</strong> (KU Eichstätt)<br>
<strong>Freek Van de Velde</strong> (KU Leuven)</p>
<p><strong>References</strong></p>
<p>Downing, Laura & Barbara Stiebels. 2012. Iconicity. In
Jochen Trommer (ed.), <em>The morphology and phonology of
exponence</em>, 379-426. Oxford: Oxford University Press.</p>
<p>Haspelmath, Martin. 2008. Frequency vs. iconicity in explaining
grammatical asymmetries. <em>Cognitive Linguistics</em> 19(1).
1–33.</p>
<p>Jaeger, T. Florian. 2010. Redundancy and reduction: Speakers
manage syntactic information density. <em>Cognitive Psychology</em>
61(1). 23–62.</p>
<p><strong>Call for abstracts:</strong></p>
<p>We invite abstracts for talks (20 minutes presentation + 10
minutes for discussion) for the workshop “<strong>Linguistic
coding asymmetries, usage frequency and informativeness</strong>”
to be held during the <a
href="http://dgfs2017.uni-saarland.de/wordpress/">39th Annual
Meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft</a>,
taking place March 8-10, 2017 at the Universität des Saarlandes
in Saarbrücken, Germany (LinguistList: <a
href="http://linguistlist.org/callconf/browse-conf-action.cfm?ConfID=246576">http://linguistlist.org/callconf/browse-conf-action.cfm?ConfID=246576</a>).
<br>
</p>
<p>Please send an anonymous one-page abstract in pdf format to <strong>darja.appelganz(at)uni-leipzig.de</strong>
by August 28, 2016. Please include your name, affiliation, and
title of the abstract in the body of your email.</p>
<p><strong>Important dates:</strong></p>
<p>Call deadline: August 28, 2016<br>
Notification of acceptance: September 15, 2016<br>
Workshop dates: March 8-10, 2017<br>
</p>
<p>P.S.<br>
List of other workshops at the same conference:<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://dgfs2017.uni-saarland.de/wordpress/arbeitsgruppen/">http://dgfs2017.uni-saarland.de/wordpress/arbeitsgruppen/</a><br>
</p>
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<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Martin Haspelmath (<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:haspelmath@shh.mpg.de">haspelmath@shh.mpg.de</a>)
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10
D-07745 Jena
&
Leipzig University
IPF 141199
Nikolaistrasse 6-10
D-04109 Leipzig
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