27.4446, Calls: Historical Linguistics/USA

[The LINGUIST List via LINGUIST]

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-4446. Tue Nov 01 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.4446, Calls: Historical Linguistics/USA

Moderators: linguist at linguistlist.org (Damir Cavar, Malgorzata E. Cavar)
Reviews: reviews at linguistlist.org (Helen Aristar-Dry, Robert Coté,
                                   Michael Czerniakowski)
Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

*****************    LINGUIST List Support    *****************
                       Fund Drive 2016
                   25 years of LINGUIST List!
Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Kenneth Steimel <ken at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: Tue, 01 Nov 2016 12:53:55
From: Helen Sims-Williams [j.sims-williams at surrey.ac.uk]
Subject: Loss of Inflection

 
Full Title: Loss of Inflection 

Date: 31-Jul-2017 - 04-Aug-2017
Location: San Antonio, Texas, USA 
Contact Person: Helen Sims-Williams
Meeting Email: j.sims-williams at surrey.ac.uk
Web Site: http://ichl23.utsa.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Workshop-Loss-of-inflection.pdf 

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 01-Dec-2016 

Meeting Description:

The loss of inflection has been observed in the history of a vast number of
languages. It plays an important theoretical role in discussions of syntactic
change (e.g. Allen 2006, Fischer 2010) and language contact and death
(McWhorter 1998, Polinsky 1995, Campbell and Muntzel 1989), and is a crucial
step in the ‘typological cycle’ (van Gelderen 2011, Igartua 2015). But while
the development of inflection has been extensively discussed in theoretical
work on language change, the mechanisms and pathways leading to inflectional
loss have received little attention beyond histories of individual languages.
This workshop will bring together scholars concerned with theoretical issues
in historical linguistics to examine the loss of inflection in broad
perspective. Our aim is to bring attention to neglected theoretical questions
concerning the loss of inflection, and to begin to integrate it into general
theories of language change.

During its recorded history English has lost most of its inflection, including
the morphological marking of mood, case and gender, and almost all of its
person and number marking. English is far from unique in this regard: the loss
of inflection has been observed in the history of a vast number of languages,
representing disparate genealogical and geographical classes. At first glance
this may appear to be just a matter of decay: words have got shorter,
categories reduced, and meaning simplified. But closer inspection reveals that
this reduction typically comes about through the interaction of innovations at
all levels of grammar. At one level the result is simplification, but the
processes that lead to it involve a complex series of systemic changes and the
adoption of new organizing principles. Far from being just a matter of decay,
the evidence so far shows that the loss of inflection follows along lines
determined by paradigmatic structure, and so reveals properties of the
organization of inflectional systems that might otherwise remain hidden. 


2nd Call for Papers:

The overarching research question of the workshop will thus be: what are the
possible pathways of inflectional loss, and what do they reveal about the
nature of inflectional systems? We particularly encourage submissions
approaching this question from the following five angles:

1. What role do the morphosyntactic features themselves play? That is, are
certain types of function more likely to be lost than others? 
2. What is the influence of the type of morphological form? For example, are
suffixes particularly prone to loss because of the particular susceptibility
of word-final position to phonological weakening?
3. Could the complexity of the inflectional system itself bring about its
demise? 
4. Since the loss of morphological marking often goes hand-in-hand with
changes in syntax, what is the relationship between the two? Does syntactic
change motivate the loss of inflection, or vice versa?
5. Is the 'natural' loss of inflection different from contact-induced change?

ICHL abstract submission:

Abstracts are invited for papers for the General Session and Workshops.
Abstracts should be a maximum of two pages in length, including references,
and may focus on any aspect of historical linguistics. Abstracts should be
submitted via the conference Easy Chair link
(https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ichl23). (If you have problems using
Easy Chair, please contact us at ichl23 at utsa.edu.). Authors may present a
maximum of two papers, whether single-authored or co-authored. Abstracts will
be reviewed anonymously by at least three members of the Scientific Committee.

Abstracts may be submitted for the General Session or for one of the Workshops
listed below. Abstracts submitted for a workshop but not accepted there will
be automatically considered for inclusion in the general session.

For details on abstract submission see http://ichl23.utsa.edu/cfp/




------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*****************    LINGUIST List Support    *****************
                       Fund Drive 2016
Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
            http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

        Thank you very much for your support of LINGUIST!
 


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-27-4446	
----------------------------------------------------------
Visit LL's Multitree project for over 1000 trees dynamically generated
from scholarly hypotheses about language relationships:
          http://multitree.org/