27.706, Calls: Historical Ling, Text/Corpus Ling/Poland

Mon Feb 8 14:26:07 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-706. Mon Feb 08 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.706, Calls: Historical Ling, Text/Corpus Ling/Poland

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Date: Mon, 08 Feb 2016 09:25:38
From: Tine Breban [tine.breban at manchester.ac.uk]
Subject: Workshop: Getting More out of Corpus Data: Empirical Evidence for Semantic Change

Full Title: Workshop: Getting More out of Corpus Data: Empirical Evidence for Semantic Change 

Date: 18-Sep-2016 - 21-Sep-2016
Location: Poznan, Poland 
Contact Person: Tine Breban
Meeting Email: tine.breban at manchester.ac.uk
Web Site: http://http://wa.amu.edu.pl/isle4/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 15-Mar-2016 

Meeting Description:

Since the advent of historical corpora, empirical research into language
change in English has soared. But even though, more, better and bigger corpora
were compiled and new methods for processing and analysing data developed,
what does not appear to have changed very much since the early corpora is what
we are looking for to detect language change. This is particularly a problem
for changes that have been defined primarily in terms of a change in function
or meaning, such as grammaticalization or subjectification. Corpora do not
directly give access to meaning, and it is common practice to support a
hypothesized change in function and meaning with evidence of differences in
form or distribution, as the latter changes can be observed empirically.
Researchers have to rely on concomitant changes that can be observed in corpus
data. The issue that this workshop seeks to redress is the limited types of
changes in form and distribution that are usually discussed as evidence.

The problem of operationalizing semantic change has been raised by several
linguists studying subjectification (Aaron and Torres Cacoullos 2005, De Smet
and Verstraete 2006, Torres Cacoullos and Schwenter 2006, López-Couso 2010,
Traugott 2010), and intersubjectification (Traugott 2010, Brems et al. 2014).
But the problem also applies for grammaticalization. Even though, it is one of
the most well-studied types of semantic change in the ‘corpus age’, the
foundational works on grammaticalization appeared in the 1980s-1990s, before
large scale diachronic corpora were widely used, and the most widely applied
proposal for operationalization is still Lehmann’s (1995 [1982]) parameters
set. The possibility to look at authentic contexts has prompted a better
understanding of the semantic-pragmatic mechanisms of change, but it has not
improved the empirical search criteria.

The aim of this workshop is to develop a more extended toolkit of empirical
changes to help the identification of semantic change. The tenet is that the
only way to do is, is by bringing together the results of as many and as
different case studies that take a micro-analytical approach to change. That
is, cases studies that bring to light the distributional changes that
accompany semantic change in English. Several examples already out there
include recent work on the English noun phrase: Adamson (2000), Breban (2010)
couple a semantic change with a change in an item’s position in relation to
other items in the noun phrase; Paradis (2000), Vandewinkel and Davidse
(2008), Ghesquière (2014) show that a change in collocational behaviour can be
a sign of semantic change; Vartiainen (2013) opens a new window on
subjectification by showing that subjectified adjectives co-occur more with
indefinite determination. Hilpert (2008) on the development of future
auxiliaries and Van Bergen (2013) on the grammaticalization of uton as an
adhortative show how a similar micro-analytical approach can be used in the
verb phrase. At sentence level, Walkden (2013), who uses position of the verb
as a window the meaning of Old English hwæt, can be an inspiration. The goal
is to build up a toolkit of form/distribution and meaning/function change
associations that can be applied in the empirical study of semantic change,
and that might form a critical mass breaking the code of the
operationalization of grammaticalization, subjectification and
intersubjectification.

Call for Papers:

This workshop welcomes papers that report on:

- case studies identifying form and distributional changes that accompany
semantic change in all areas of English
- the operationalization of theoretical notions such as collocational
expansion (Himmelmann 2004), decategorialization (Hopper 1991), etc.
- case studies applying quantitative analysis to micro-analytical changes in
form/distribution
- case studies that explore how theoretical proposals for operationalization
such as Boye and Harder (2012) for grammaticalization and Visconti (2012) for
subjectification can be applied to corpus data
- the implications of form/distributional changes for our understanding of the
mechanisms of semantic change, and/or a Construction Grammar model of change

This workshop will be held during ISLE4 (18-21 September 2016, Poznan, day of
the workshop TBC). Papers in the workshop will be allotted 20 minutes for
presentation and 10 minutes for discussion, in keeping with the format of the
conference. Please submit your abstract (300-500 words, excluding the title,
linguistic examples and references) though the EasyChair system on the
conference website (http://wa.amu.edu.pl/isle4/). The deadline for submissions
is 15 March 2016. Notification of acceptance of papers is 25 April 2016.

Convenor: Tine Breban (University of Manchester)

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