18.2571, Calls: Historical Linguistics/UK

Tue Sep 4 13:48:24 UTC 2007

LINGUIST List: Vol-18-2571. Tue Sep 04 2007. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 18.2571, Calls: Historical Linguistics/UK

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1)
Date: 01-Sep-2007
From: Anne Breitbarth < ab667 at cam.ac.uk >
Subject: Continuity and Change in Grammar

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 04 Sep 2007 09:46:24
From: Anne Breitbarth [ab667 at cam.ac.uk]
Subject:  Continuity and Change in Grammar
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Full Title: Continuity and Change in Grammar 

Date: 18-Mar-2008 - 20-Mar-2008
Location: Cambridge, United Kingdom 
Contact Person: Anne Breitbarth
Meeting Email: ccg08 at easychair.org
Web Site: http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/ab667/negproject/continuity-change-conf.html 

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 01-Oct-2007 

Meeting Description:

We are pleased to announce an international conference on Continuity and Change
in Grammar, which will take place from 18-20 March 2008 at the University of
Cambridge. The focus will be on theoretical and methodological aspects of
morphosyntactic change and conservatism.

The aim of the conference is to bring together researchers working on different
aspects of linguistic transmission in order to enhance our understanding of what
makes languages change and what in turn prevents them from changing. 

Second call for papers

Factors that are thought to play a role in the diachronic development of
languages include first and (imperfect) second language acquisition, the latter
typically under conditions of language contact. The role of language contact and
resulting (biased) bi- or multilingualism in morpho-syntactic change, and the
question of whether in fact there can be any entirely language-internal change
are topics that have gained much interest recently. If language contact has a
role in triggering change, can it equally be shown to play a role in preventing
it? What other factors can prevent or inhibit a change that might be expected on
the basis that other languages show a comparable change under comparable conditions?

A particular focus of the conference will be syntactic continuity, that is,
cases where syntactic change fails to happen, or at least is delayed, even
though change would be expected on the basis of parallel changes in other
languages. An example is Jespersen's Cycle, which occurred in a continuum of
languages beginning in early Old Norse in northern Europe, and giving the
appearance of spreading south from Scandinavia via German, English, Dutch,
Welsh, Breton, French and northern Italian dialects. In Jespersen's Cycle as it
is found in several European languages, a preverbal negation marker is first
reinforced and later replaced by a postverbal one. As Jespersen's Cycle seems to
have spread geographically (essentially from north to south) in the course of
the last millennium and to affect languages from different subgroups of
Indo-European, it has been suggested that this might be a contact phenomenon or
even a manifestation of a more general western European convergence area (Ramat
and Bernini 1990, Bernini and Ramat 1996, Haspelmath 1998, 2001). However,
Polish and especially Czech, which have been in very close contact with German
(and Yiddish) for centuries, have never undergone a change of this sort in their
negation systems, even though their preverbal negation markers have undergone
considerable weakening (in Czech, for example, ne behaves like a verbal prefix).
Such resistence to change appears to cast doubt on the role of contact in the
spread of postverbal adverbial negation. A topic that belongs to this general
field of syntactic changes that are expected, but fail to happen, are changes
which occur in some dialects of a given language but are delayed in others. The
conference aims at encouraging discussion on what might cause syntactic
continuity in general. This is an entirely novel perspective, as previous
research has exclusively focussed on explaining linguistic change.

Topics addressed at the conference may be from a range of perspectives,
theoretical linguistic as well as a language acquisitional, contact linguistic
and sociolinguistic, and the conference aims at creating discussion and exchange
between researchers with generative and non-generative backgrounds and also
beyond (historical) linguistics itself. Longstanding points of dispute have been
the perceived directionality and the gradualness of syntactic change.
Directionality seems to conflict with generative models of linguistic change,
which localise abrupt reanalyses or parameter resetting in individual speakers.
However, long-term pathways and cycles do seem to be observable as well. How can
this clash be reconciled? Much research has been devoted to accomodating
gradualness within a generative conception of syntactic change, such as the
grammar competition approach (Kroch 1989 etc.). However, problems with grammar
competition approaches have not remained unnoticed, and invite reconsideration.

We particularly invite submissions addressing the following questions: 

- contact-induced language change 
- first language acquisition and syntactic change 
- bilingualism and syntactic change 
- directionality, gradualness and long-term developments 
- absence of syntactic change / syntactic conservatism 
- general theoretical models of syntactic change and continuity, theoretical or
computational 
- empirical case studies discussing instances of continuity and/or change in grammar
- change in the expression of negation 
- linguistic and cultural contact in the Middle Ages 

We invite anonymous submissions for 20+10 minute presentations, which will be
reviewed by an international committee of referees. Abstacts should be submitted
in .pdf format via EasyChair. Go to http://www.easychair.org/CCG08/, create an
account if you do not yet have one and login as an author. The text of the
abstract itself must be anonymous; you will be asked to fill in your name,
affiliation and email address when you create your EasyChair account. This
ensures a fair and unbiased review procedure. Abstracts should not exceed one
page of A4, with one-inch margins on all sides, with the possibility of one
additional page for graphs, figures, examples and references. Deadline for
submissions is 1 October 2007. Notification of acceptance is around 1 November 2007.

Invited speakers:
Jan-Terje Faarlund (Oslo)
Richard Ingham (Birmingham)
John Sundquist (Purdue)
Sarah Grey Thomason (Michigan)

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