30.3069, Confs: Discipline of Linguistics/Germany

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-30-3069. Thu Aug 08 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.3069, Confs: Discipline of Linguistics/Germany

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Date: Thu, 08 Aug 2019 20:04:38
From: Martin Haspelmath [haspelmath at shh.mpg.de]
Subject: Universals in Grammatical Theorizing

 
Universals in Grammatical Theorizing 

Date: 04-Mar-2020 - 06-Mar-2020 
Location: Hamburg, Germany 
Contact: Martin Haspelmath 
Contact Email: haspelmath at shh.mpg.de 
Meeting URL: https://research.uni-leipzig.de/unicodas/dgfs-workshop-universals-in-grammatical-theorizing-2020/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Discipline of Linguistics 

Meeting Description: 

Empirical consequences of universal claims in grammatical theorizing

Universals of grammar have played a prominent role in general linguistics
since the 1960s, but the connection between universal claims and empirical
testing has often been tenuous. The great majority of linguists have always
been working on a single language, but many of them now strive to contribute
to a larger enterprise. Thus, general claims have often been based initially
on a few languages, or even just on one. As a result, the literature is full
of proposals that have broad implications while we do not know to what extent
they are true.

This workshop is intended to complement the conference theme of “linguistic
diversity” by focusing on empirical evidence for linguistic uniformity, but
from a variety of different perspectives. Evidence for universal claims can
come from a wide range of sources, e.g.

- large-scale worldwide grammar-mining (along the lines of Greenberg’s seminal
work)

- large text collections, either parallel (Cysouw & Wälchli 2007), or
annotated in a parallel way (Universal Dependencies, Nivre et al. 2016)

- artificial language learning experiments, because these remove the
conventionality that is associated with all naturally developed languages
(e.g. Culbertson 2012)

- the absence of a credible way of learning the relevant pattern (poverty of
the stimulus, Lasnik & Lidz 2016)

- the absence of published counterevidence to well-known claims

This workshop would ideally bring together general linguists with diverse
theoretical outlooks, so in addition to papers that discuss actual evidence
for actual universal claims, it is also open to well-argued contributions
questioning the idea that special evidence is needed for universal claims,
and/or that justify the widespread practice of basing general claims on few
languages.

Invited Speakers:

- Katharina Hartmann (Goethe University Frankfurt am Main)
- Stefan Müller (Humboldt University Berlin)
 






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