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Dear colleagues,<br>
<br>
Naomi Peck and I are organizing a workshop on spoken typology at the
next ALT in Lyon, July 2026. If you are working with spoken language
data from a typological perspective, we'd be delighted for you to
join our workshop! You can find the workshop description and the
submission details below. <br>
<br>
Best,<br>
Laura (typing) and Naomi<br>
<br>
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size="4"><b><br>
Workshop at ALT2026: Incorporating the Spoken Signal Into
Grammatical Typology</b></font><br>
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Date: <b>01-Jul-2026 - 03-Jul-2026</b><br>
Location: <b>Lyon, France</b><br>
Meeting URL: <a href="https://alt-2026.sciencesconf.org/"
rel="nofollow" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://alt-2026.sciencesconf.org/</a><br>
Abstract Submission Info:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://alt-2026.sciencesconf.org/resource/page/id/2">https://alt-2026.sciencesconf.org/resource/page/id/2</a><br>
Submission Deadline: <b>15-Oct-2025<br>
</b>Convenors: Laura Becker (University of Freiburg) & Naomi
Peck (University of Freiburg)<br>
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size="4"><b><br>
</b></font><br>
<font size="4"><b>Incorporating the Spoken Signal Into Grammatical
Typology<br>
<br>
</b></font><b>The Written Bias in Typology</b><br>
Most languages are primarily spoken, with only a minority of
languages or speaker communities developing a writing system. We can
estimate that less than 10% of all languages spoken today have
developed writing to the extent that they have a literary tradition,
with the other 90% being exclusively spoken or written to a much
lesser extent (Ong 1982: 7). Despite the primacy of the spoken mode
for language, most work on grammar has relied upon the study of
written representations, with typology being no exception. The
information on grammatical structures needed for a typological study
is usually extracted from transcribed examples in reference grammars
or taken from a typological database such as WALS or Grambank, which
are based on written resources of languages themselves. Even
typological or cross-linguistic studies that use corpus data often
have to rely on written records, given that most cross-linguistic
corpus collections (such as the Universal Dependency treebanks) are
based on compilations of written data.<br>
<b><br>
Evidence for the Spoken Signal Affecting Grammar</b><br>
Despite the general reliance on written data, typologists have begun
to seriously consider the impact of the spoken signal on grammar.
Two notable long-term projects, MultiCAST (Haig & Schnell 2021)
and DoReCo (Seifart et al. 2024), have compiled annotated and
time-aligned crosslinguistic spontaneous speech corpora, providing
invaluable resources for typological corpus studies that consider
phonetic and prosodic information for grammatical analysis.<br>
Several typological studies have investigated phonetic properties in
relation to grammar with spontaneous speech data from typologically
distinct languages. A number of studies explored how phone duration
helps to segment the continuous speech signal. Seifart et al. (2021)
show that words are systematically lengthened in utterance-final
positions across languages. Similarly, Blum et al. (2024) find that
consonant lengthening marks the beginning of words. Furthermore, we
have direct evidence for grammatical systems being sensitive to
durational effects. Seifart et al. (2018) show that nouns slow down
speech compared to verbs, and Becker (submitted) confirms that
high-frequency grammatical markers are phonetically shortened
compared to phonologically comparable but less frequent markers in
the world’s languages.<br>
Similarly, we have evidence that prosody interacts with grammatical
structure, especially when it comes to prosodic boundaries and
intonation units. For instance, Mettouchi (2018) argues that
prosodic integration is key to understanding grammatical relations
in Kabyle (Afro-Asiatic). More broadly, Himmelmann (2014, 2022)
argues that prosodic boundaries constrain how separate linguistic
elements can coalesce phonologically and become grammatical units.
This is supported by Peck & Becker (2024), who revealed complex
interactions between syntactic boundaries and silent pauses.
Similarly, Reinöhl & Casaretto (2018) use evidence from prosodic
unithood in historical poems to explain the absence of potential
grammaticalization processes in Modern Indo-Aryan languages.<br>
<b><br>
Aim of the Workshop</b><br>
In this workshop, our aim is to bring together typologists who
explore how the unique properties associated with the spoken signal
are related to grammatical structures across languages. Our
objective is to gain a better understanding of how phonetic and
prosodic properties interact with other levels of grammatical
structures, how they can affect language change and
grammaticalization, and what methods we have and need to study the
effect of the spoken signal on grammar from a typological
perspective.<br>
<b><br>
Topics of the Workshop</b><br>
Potential topics include, but are not limited to:<br>
- empirical investigations of spoken language phenomena in relation
to grammar (crosslinguistic studies, single language studies, both
experimental or corpus-based)<br>
- explorations of the interaction of suprasegmental properties (e.g.
tone, stress, pitch) and spoken language processes (e.g. pausing,
durational modulation) with grammar<br>
- explanations for grammatical phenomena which rely on properties of
the spoken signal<br>
- methodological reflections on how we can incorporate properties of
the spoken signal in synchronic and/or diachronic studies<br>
- methodological investigations on how our practices of writing
spoken data influence typological analyses<br>
<br>
Submissions to the workshop should be sent through via the open call
for papers for ALT 2026. Please make sure that you include the
workshop title as part of your abstract underneath your title if you
wish your talk to be part of the workshop. Feel free to get in touch
with the convenors if you wish to check whether your contribution
will fit in with the theme of the workshop.<br>
<b><br>
References</b><br>
Blum, Frederic, Ludger Paschen, Robert Forkel, Susanne Fuchs &
Frank Seifart. 2024. Consonant lengthening marks the beginning of
words across a diverse sample of languages. Nature Human Behaviour.
1–12.<br>
Haig, Geoffrey & Stefan Schnell. 2021. Multi-CAST: Multilingual
corpus of annotated spoken texts. <br>
Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 2014. Asymmetries in the prosodic phrasing
of function words: Another look at the suffixing preference.
Language 90(4). 927–960.<br>
Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 2022. Prosodic phrasing and the emergence of
phrase structure. Linguistics 60(3). 715–743.<br>
Mettouchi, Amina. 2018. The interaction of state, prosody and linear
order in Kabyle (Berber): Grammatical relations and information
structure. In Mauro Tosco (ed.), Afro-Asiatic: Data and
perspectives, 261–285. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.<br>
Ong, Walter J. 1982. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the
Word. New York: Methuen.<br>
Peck, Naomi & Laura Becker. 2024. Syntactic Pausing?
Re-examining the associations in spontaneous speech data.
Linguistics Vanguard 10(1). 223–237.<br>
Reinöhl, Uta & Antje Casaretto. 2018. When grammaticalization
does NOT occur: Prosody-syntax mismatches in Indo-Aryan. Diachronica
35(2). 238–276.<br>
Seifart, Frank, Ludger Paschen & Matthew Stave (eds.). 2024.
Language Documentation Reference Corpus (DoReCo) 2.0. Lyon.<br>
Seifart, Frank, Jan Strunk, Swintha Danielsen, Iren Hartmann,
Brigitte Pakendorf, Søren Wichmann, Alena Witzlack-Makarevich,
Nikolaus P. Himmelmann & Balthasar Bickel. 2021. The extent and
degree of utterance-final word lengthening in spontaneous speech
from 10 languages. Linguistics Vanguard 7(1). 20190063.<br>
Seifart, Frank, Jan Strunk, Swintha Danielsen, Iren Hartmann,
Brigitte Pakendorf, Søren Wichmann, Alena Witzlack-Makarevich, Nivja
H. de Jong & Balthasar Bickel. 2018. Nouns slow down speech
across structurally and culturally diverse languages. Proceedings of
the National<br>
Academy of Sciences 115(22). 5720–5725.
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