26.4982, Calls: Computational Ling, Historical Ling, Morphology/Netherlands

Mon Nov 9 16:58:04 UTC 2015

LINGUIST List: Vol-26-4982. Mon Nov 09 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.4982, Calls: Computational Ling, Historical Ling, Morphology/Netherlands

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Date: Mon, 09 Nov 2015 11:57:50
From: Sebastian Collin [s.collin at let.ru.nl]
Subject: The Development of Argument-Marking Systems

Full Title: The Development of Argument-Marking Systems 

Date: 31-Mar-2016 - 01-Apr-2016
Location: Nijmegen, Gelderland, Netherlands 
Contact Person: Sebastian Collin
Meeting Email: s.collin at let.ru.nl
Web Site: http://www.ru.nl/grammarandcognition/events/workshops/development-argument-marking-systems/call-papers/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Historical Linguistics; Morphology 

Call Deadline: 10-Jan-2016 

Meeting Description:

A fundamental task for language is to provide the rules to map meaning to form. In the 
communication of an event, these rules should link semantic and information-structural 
roles, such as agent, patient, and topic, to their grammatical functions, such as subject and 
object. Despite their importance for communication, grammatical strategies of argument 
marking (viz. word order, head marking, and dependent marking) seem surprisingly limited 
and redundant, and complex at the same time.

Rather than studying individual argument-marking strategies, the focus of this workshop is 
on their joint usage and interaction, taking a systemic perspective. For example, in 
Hungarian changes in word order were made possible by the development of case marking 
(E. Kiss 2013) and in North American languages, word order is strict in the absence of 
bound person marking (Mithun 1991). Relevant questions are: Why do languages not use 
a simple and straightforward means of encoding who did what to whom? How did 
languages end up doing what they do? How did argument-marking strategies first emerge 
and how do they interact?

The goal of this workshop is to try to bridge the gap between what can be hypothesized 
about the earliest emergence of argument marking (Jackendoff 2002) and (reconstructing) 
the oldest stages of natural languages (Barddal to appear), with a special interest in using 
computational modeling (van Trijp 2012).

This workshop is organized as part of the NWO-funded project The exaptation of argument 
marking (PI Sander Lestrade).

Invited speakers: Johanna Barddal (Ghent University) and Remi van Trijp (Sony lab Paris)

References
E. Kiss (2013), From Proto-Hungarian SOV to Old Hungarian Top Foc V X*. Diachronica 
30(2): 202-231.
Mithun (1991), The development of bound pronominal paradigms. In: Lehman and Jakusz 
Hewitt (eds), Language Typology: Typological Models in Reconstruction. Amsterdam: John 
Benjamins.
van Trijp (2012), The Evolution of Case Systems for Marking Event Structure. In: Steels 
(ed.), Experiments in Cultural Language Evolution. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Barddal (to appear), Syntax and syntactic reconstruction. In: Bowern and Evans (eds), The 
Routledge handbook of historical linguistics.
Jackendoff (2002), Foundations of language. Oxford: OUP.

Call for Papers:

Anonymized abstracts are invited for 30 minute talks, including discussion. Please send your 
two-page abstract as a pdf attachment, providing author and contact information in the body of 
the e-mail, to s.collin at let.ru.nl.

Notification of acceptance: January 31

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