27.2704, Calls: General Ling, Morphology, Syntax, Typology/Germany

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LINGUIST List: Vol-27-2704. Thu Jun 23 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.2704, Calls: General Ling, Morphology, Syntax, Typology/Germany

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Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2016 09:15:08
From: Martin Haspelmath [haspelmath at shh.mpg.de]
Subject: Linguistic coding asymmetries, usage frequency and informativeness

 
Full Title: Linguistic Coding Asymmetries, Usage Frequency and Informativeness 

Date: 08-Mar-2017 - 10-Mar-2017
Location: Saarbrücken, Germany 
Contact Person: Martin Haspelmath
Meeting Email: haspelmath at shh.mpg.de
Web Site: http://research.uni-leipzig.de/unicodas/dgfs-workshop-coding-asymmetries/ 

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Morphology; Syntax; Typology 

Call Deadline: 28-Aug-2016 

Meeting Description:

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.

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).

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 shorten the most frequent forms does not seem to be general
enough, and the precise diachronic mechanisms are still too little known.

Ideally, this workshop would bring together grammarians, typologists, corpus
linguists, psycholinguists and diachronic linguists to exchange research
results and address these issues jointly.

Invited speaker:

Gertraud Fenk-Oczlon (University of Klagenfurt)

Organizer:
Martin Haspelmath (MPI-SHH Jena & Leipzig U)

Abstract reading committee:
Holger Diessel (University of Jena)
Sander Lestrade (RU Nijmegen)
Damaris Nübling (University of Mainz)
Elke Ronneberger-Sibold (KU Eichstätt)
Freek Van de Velde (KU Leuven)


Call for Papers: 

We invite abstracts for talks (20 minutes presentation + 10 minutes for
discussion) for the workshop “Linguistic coding asymmetries, usage frequency
and informativeness” to be held during the 39th Annual Meeting of the Deutsche
Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft, taking place March 8-10, 2017 at the
Universität des Saarlandes in Saarbrücken, Germany.

Please send an anonymous one-page abstract in pdf format to
darja.appelganz(at)uni-leipzig.de by August 28, 2016. Please include your
name, affiliation, and title of the abstract in the body of your email.

Important dates:

Call deadline: August 28, 2016
Notification of acceptance: September 15, 2016
Workshop dates: March 8-10, 2017




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