28.4190, Calls: Comp Ling, Genetic Classification, Historical Ling, Text/Corpus Ling, Typology/Estonia

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-28-4190. Thu Oct 12 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.4190, Calls: Comp Ling, Genetic Classification, Historical Ling, Text/Corpus Ling, Typology/Estonia

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Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2017 14:20:24
From: Natalia Levshina [natalevs at gmail.com]
Subject: Comparative Corpus Linguistics: New perspectives

 
Full Title: Comparative Corpus Linguistics: New perspectives 
Short Title: CompCorp 

Date: 29-Aug-2018 - 01-Sep-2018
Location: Tallinn, Estonia 
Contact Person: Natalia Levshina
Meeting Email: natalevs at gmail.com

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Genetic Classification; Historical Linguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics; Typology 

Call Deadline: 10-Nov-2017 

Meeting Description:

Convenors: 
Natalia Levshina (Leipzig University), Annemarie Verkerk (Max Planck Institute
for the Science of Human History, Jena) and Steven Moran (University of
Zurich)

Although the main bulk of existing corpus-based research is probably formed by
language-specific descriptive studies, corpora have long been used
successfully for large-scale language comparison and for testing linguistic
generalizations, e.g. Zipf (1935) and Greenberg (1960). Nowadays, linguists
can enjoy the abundance of large comparable and parallel corpora and other
multilingual resources, such as the Universal Dependencies Corpora (Nivre et
al. 2017), the parallel Bible translations (Mayer & Cysouw 2014), OPUS corpus
(Tiedemann 2012), Multi-CAST (Haig & Schnell 2016) and Google Books Ngrams.
The availability of such resources provides functional linguists, typologists,
historical linguists and psycholinguists with new exciting opportunities to
answer big theoretical questions, exemplified by successful applications of
comparative corpus-based approaches such as the following: 

- formulation, refinement and explanation of linguistic generalizations, e.g.
Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation (Piatandosi et al. 2011; Bentz & Ferrer-i-Cancho
2016), the principle of dependency length minimization (Futrell et al. 2015)
and the principle of economy in morphosyntactic alternations (Haspelmath et
al. 2014)
- computation of corpus-based measures that represent typological parameters,
such as analyticity, syntheticity and complexity (e.g. Juola 1998; Szmrecsanyi
2009; Ehret & Szmrecsanyi 2016)
- using massively parallel and comparable corpora for unsupervised pattern
detection, e.g. finding the universal conceptual dimensions of motion verbs
(Wälchli & Cysouw 2012) and automatic extraction of typological features (Virk
et al. 2017)
- development of new statistical methods, and probabilistic and connectionist
approaches to the study of language acquisition (e.g. Chater & Manning 2006,
Behrens 2008), in particular from a cross-linguistic perspective (MacWhinney &
Snow 1985; Moran et al 2016)
- quantitative diachronic typology, e.g. development of manner and path verbs
in Indo-European (Verkerk 2015)
- detection of areal patterns in genealogically related languages (e.g. van
der Auwera et al. 2005; von Waldenfels 2015)
- usage-based explanations of the evolution of linguistic types, e.g. studies
related to the Preferred Argument Structure hypothesis (Du Bois 1987; Haig &
Schnell 2016)
- cross-linguistic comparison of probabilistic constraints on multifactorial
language variation, e.g. the use of analytic and lexical causatives (Levshina
2016)

The aim of this workshop is to bring together typologists, functional
linguists, psycholinguists and other specialists who use cross-linguistic
corpora for testing their hypotheses, and corpus linguists who build and use
such corpora to address research questions in linguistic diversity. We want to
discuss the recent developments, perspectives and challenges of corpus-based
language comparison.


Call for Papers:

We seek contributions that sample a sizable amount of the world’s languages,
whether at the global level, or within particular families or areas. A list of
potential contributions includes, but is not limited to, the following: 

- case studies showing how one can use the information derived from corpora
for the purposes of typological classification
- corpus investigations of linguistic generalizations and explaining these
findings in terms of processing-related, communicative and learning
constraints or biases
- corpus-based language comparison from a genealogical and/or areal
perspective
- corpus-based studies in diachronic typology and historical linguistics;
- studies addressing the problem of comparative concepts (Haspelmath 2010) and
its consequences for comparative corpus linguistics, in particular, for the
development of cross-linguistic annotation schemas;
- presentation of newly developed cross-linguistic corpora, preferably with a
case study revealing their possibilities
- discussion of statistical methods and visualization tools for analysing
cross-linguistic corpus data

If you are interested in participating in this workshop, please send your
short abstract (up to 300 words), along with the name(s), affiliation(s) and
contact information of all co-authors, to Natalia Levshina
(natalevs at gmail.com) before November 10 2017. If the proposal is accepted, the
contributors will have to submit full versions of their abstracts, which will
be reviewed by the SLE scientific committee.




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