29.3591, Calls: Historical Linguistics, Typology/Australia

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LINGUIST List: Vol-29-3591. Tue Sep 18 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.3591, Calls: Historical Linguistics, Typology/Australia

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Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2018 21:05:55
From: Eugen Hill [eugen.hill at uni-koeln.de]
Subject: Trends in the Development and Evolution of Inflection

 
Full Title: Trends in the Development and Evolution of Inflection 

Date: 01-Jul-2019 - 05-Jul-2019
Location: Canberra, ACT, Australia 
Contact Person: Eugen Hill
Meeting Email: eugen.hill at uni-koeln.de
Web Site: http://cloudstor.aarnet.edu.au/plus/s/j4KitFmCsOTQIxb#pdfviewer 

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Typology 

Call Deadline: 12-Oct-2018 

Meeting Description:

Trends in the Development and Evolution of Inflection

It is well known that in the development and subsequent evolution of
inflection cross-linguistically recurrent patterns can be identified. Several
patterns are robust enough to justify being called “trend”. The most
well-known trends are, for instance, the following:

- inflection trapped between the stem of a word and a former clitic tends to
secondarily relocate toward a word-external position,
- conjugation patterns containing bound person-indexes tend to restructure on
the basis of the 3rd person secondarily reanalysed as the bare stem,
- languages tend to abandon very short inflectional forms of nouns, pronouns
and verbs either by replacing such forms with compounds or by tolerating
defectiveness.

The aim of the proposed workshop is to improve our present-day understanding
of such cross-linguistic trends in the development and evolution of inflection
by describing more trends and identifying the determinants which may be
responsible for such trends.
To achieve this, the workshop will address the following particular issues
resp. research questions.

-- Can more cross-linguistically recurrent patterns in development and
evolution of inflection be discovered? How to look for them in a principled
resp. systematic way?

In recent times more diachronic trends in inflection have been proposed. All
such trends have been discovered by means of directly looking into the
development of languages either descending from a documented common ancestor
or being closely related, thus allowing for a “shallow” reconstruction of an
undocumented common ancestor. The obvious advantage of this approach is the
control over both the starting-point and the end-point of the relevant
processes. Its disadvantage is the amount of information about the relevant
languages which is needed for such an investigation. Is it possible to infer
typological trends in the evolution of inflection from other sources, such as
the synchronic cross-linguistic distribution of inflectional patterns?

-- Can trends be used for establishing uncommon or rare patterns of change?
How to deal with conflicting trends?

Describing trends in inflection helps to structure the evidence in a way
facilitating a more comprehensive investigation of inflectional change in the
relevant domain. So, the description of externalization of inflection has led
to the recent discovery of its rare opposite. Can more uncommon patterns of
change be discovered? How to look for them in a more comprehensive resp. more
systematic way?

-- What are the factors responsible for trends in the development and
evolution of inflection? What are the possible patterns of interaction between
these factors?

It seems established that trends in the development and evolution of
inflection partly imply a well-defined target- or goal-construction and partly
seem to depend on the cross-linguistically common sources of the structure in
question.
The question which remains to be answered is as to what may be the possible
determinants of goal-oriented changes or what may define the goal? An obvious
factor is areal pressure, i.e. a goal-oriented change may target a structure
present in a neighbouring language. A second possible factor might be the
structural pressure from within the system in question itself. The third
possible factor may be constituted by synchronic cognitive or functional
preferences which define structures more suitable for processing information.
It is important to identify evidence helpful for establishing which factors
may be at work in the case of each particular diachronic trend and what are
the possible patterns of interaction between these factors.


Call for Papers:

The workshop welcomes papers dealing with the above stated questions from both
the theoretical and the empirical perspective. Case studies on particular
trends are as welcome as papers offering new generalizations.

Talks can be submitted through
http://www.dynamicsoflanguage.edu.au/ichl24/call-for-papers.




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