28.4832, Calls: English, Comp Ling, Gen Ling, Historical Ling, Socioling, Text/Corpus Ling/Finland

Thu Nov 16 15:17:57 UTC 2017

LINGUIST List: Vol-28-4832. Thu Nov 16 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.4832, Calls: English, Comp Ling, Gen Ling, Historical Ling, Socioling, Text/Corpus Ling/Finland

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Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2017 10:17:43
From: Lucía Loureiro-Porto [lucia.loureiro at uib.es]
Subject: Democratization in English(es): Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives

Full Title: Democratization in English(es): Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives 

Date: 30-May-2018 - 30-May-2018
Location: Tampere, Finland 
Contact Person: Lucía Loureiro-Porto
Meeting Email: lucia.loureiro at uib.es
Web Site: http://www.uta.fi/ltl/en/ICAME2018/programme/workshops.html 

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

Subject Language(s): English (eng)

Call Deadline: 15-Dec-2017 

Meeting Description:

Social changes are usually reflected through language, and a recent example of
it is democratization, the linguistic result of “changing norms in cultural
relations” (Leech et al. 2009: 259). More specifically, it is said to imply
“the removal of inequalities and asymmetries in the discursive and linguistic
rights, obligations and prestige of groups of people” (Fairclough 1992: 201),
and to reflect the “speakers’ tendency to avoid unequal and face-threatening
modes of interaction” (Farrelly and Seoane 2012: 393). Thus democratization
refers to a tendency to reduce markers of social distance and a wish for
increasing social equality through language. As such, it has been at work in
English from the 19th century onwards, and it is particularly common in the
20th c. Democratization has been the focus of many corpus-based studies, where
it has been held partially responsible, for example, for changes in the use of
specific modals and semi-modals in British and American English (e.g. Myhill
1995, Leech 2003, Smith 2003). Other suggested effects include the decrease of
titular nouns (Mr, Ms., Mrs.) and masculine pronouns (Baker 2010a), and the
use of generic they instead of he to refer to an epicene antecedent (Farrelly
& Seoane 2012).

Nevertheless, the term ‘democratization’ is not universally used and may not
occur in studies dealing with the same phenomenon. For example, while Baker
(2010b) suggests that the reduction of male bias in language use is
attributable to societal democratization, the term is not used in Paterson
(2014), who simply talks about ‘gender equality’ and ‘non-sexist language’.
Another issue is that in corpus studies democratization is often considered to
overlap with related processes, particularly colloquialization and
informalization (Mair 1997, 2006, Farrelly & Seoane 2012). This is probably
due to the fact that democratization is not fully characterized with respect
to factors such as register (Biber 2012), origin (Paterson 2014), and
consciousness of speakers (Labov 2007). Detailed corpus-based analyses along
these dimensions would contribute to disentangle democratization from other
processes. 

Call for Papers:

Social changes are usually reflected through language, and a recent example of
it is democratization, the linguistic result of “changing norms in cultural
relations” (Leech et al. 2009: 259). More specifically, it is said to imply
“the removal of inequalities and asymmetries in the discursive and linguistic
rights, obligations and prestige of groups of people” (Fairclough 1992: 201),
and to reflect the “speakers’ tendency to avoid unequal and face-threatening
modes of interaction” (Farrelly and Seoane 2012: 393). 

We invite papers addressing linguistic democratization from different
perspectives: diachronic and synchronic, in inner and outer-circle varieties,
and using both large and small, carefully curated corpora. Possible research
questions include:

How do democratization patterns differ in inner and outer-circle varieties? 
Do democratizing features exhibit similar historical developments?
What role do registers play in the emergence and diffusion of the linguistic
features involved?
What can be gained from an analysis of mega-corpora of global Englishes like
GloWbE (Davies 2013a) or the NOW corpus (Davies 2013b)?
What evidence can social media corpora provide about democratization of
discourse (cf. Baker and McEnery 2015)?

Abstracts should be between 400 and 500 words in length (excluding references)
and both full papers and work-in-progress reports are welcome. They should be
sent to both lucia.loureiro at uib.es and turo.hiltunen at helsinki.fi and the
deadline for abstract submission is 15 December 2017. Notifications of
acceptance will be sent out by 1 January 2018.

References:

Baker, Paul & Tony McEnery. 2015. “Who Benefits When Discourse Gets
Democratised? Analysing a Twitter Corpus around the British Benefits Street
Debate”. In Paul Baker & Tony McEnery (eds.), Corpora and Discourse Studies:
Integrating Discourse and Corpora. London: Palgrave, pp. 244–265.
Davies, Mark. 2013a. Corpus of Global Web-Based English: 1.9 billion words
from speakers in 20 countries (GloWbE). Available online at
https://corpus.byu.edu/glowbe/.
Davies, Mark. 2013b. Corpus of News on the Web (NOW): 3+ billion words from 20
countries, updated every day. Available online at https://corpus.byu.edu/now/.
Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Farrelly, Michael & Elena Seoane. 2012. “Democratisation”. In Terttu
Nevalainen & Elizabeth Closs Traugott (eds.), The Oxford Handbook the History
of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 392–401.
Leech, Geoffrey, Marianne Hundt, Christian Mair, & Nicholas Smith. 2009.
Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

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