32.3747, Calls: Historical Linguistics/United Kingdom

Wed Dec 1 05:53:40 UTC 2021

LINGUIST List: Vol-32-3747. Wed Dec 01 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.3747, Calls: Historical Linguistics/United Kingdom

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Date: Wed, 01 Dec 2021 00:53:21
From: Hendrik De Smet [hendrik.desmet at kuleuven.be]
Subject: Acting on Actuation - Why Here, Why Now?

Full Title: Acting on Actuation - Why Here, Why Now? 

Date: 02-Aug-2022 - 02-Aug-2022
Location: Oxford, United Kingdom 
Contact Person: Hendrik De Smet
Meeting Email: hendrik.desmet at kuleuven.be
Web Site: https://ichl.ling-phil.ox.ac.uk/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 15-Dec-2021 

Meeting Description:

Acting on actuation – Why here, why now?
(convenors: Hendrik De Smet, Guglielmo Inglese & Malte Rosemeyer)

For any theory of language change the ultimate challenge is the actuation
problem, as formulated by Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (1968: 102): “Why do
changes in a structural feature take place in a particular language at a given
time, but not in other languages with the same feature, or in the same
language at other times?” 

The actuation problem is a problem of explanation and prediction. Why is this
particular change occurring here and now? Or, given the here and now, what
change is going to occur? A solution to these problems is so difficult to
achieve because of the intrinsic complexities of language and change. Any
specific change may involve a multiplicity of causes. Those causes may be
language-external, reflecting the contiguities of history. On the internal
side, language is a complex-adaptive system that can recruit a variety of
resources to achieve a variety of communicative goals, again making it hard to
predict how such a system will respond to any new situation.

However, over the past decades, conceptual and empirical developments have
contributed to bringing solutions to the actuation problem within closer
reach. 

Conceptually, substantial advances have been made in unifying external and
internal perspectives on language change, typically by focusing on the process
of linguistic selection (Haspelmath 1999; Croft 2000; Schmid 2020).
Theoretical advances also include more accurate models of change in contact
situations (Thomason & Kaufmann 1988; Matras & Sakel 2007; Walkden 2017:
415-417). Moreover, the relevant models embrace probabilistic thinking,
describing speakers’ choices in terms of likelihoods (Plunkett & Marchman
1993; Bod 2015). As such, a probabilistic approach to actuation, informed by
models of the cognitive processes underlying linguistic choices, and of the
dynamics of language contact, comes within reach. 

Empirically, efforts in worldwide language documentation and cross-linguistic
comparison have offered a much firmer basis to recognize regularities of
language change, such as grammaticalization (Hopper & Traugott 2003).
Moreover, the discipline has seen a surge in the availability of usage-data,
which allow description of change in much greater detail (Petré & Anthonissen
2020; De Smet 2016). With an improved empirical basis to start from, new and
better opportunities arise for testing and fine-tuning our hypotheses of what
drives language change. 

In light of these encouraging developments, the goal of this workshop is to
persuade historical linguists that the actuation problem is not unassailable.
To that end, we bring together researchers with different backgrounds and
expertise – variationists, typologists, phonologists, and historical linguists
– to jointly tackle the most basic question about language change.

Call for Papers:

We invite empirically-driven reflections and case studies on the following
topics:

- Longitudinal historical analyses that tackle actuation by comparing
languages/dialects/idiolects etc.
- Typological, interactional, or experimental studies that investigate change
in synchrony
- Studies of extralinguistic factors representing language ecology, e.g.
contact, demographic change, standardization etc.
- Methodological reflections on how to solve the actuation problem: new types
of data and analyses 

Please submit abstracts through the general ICHL25 website using EasyChair
(https://ichl.ling-phil.ox.ac.uk/). When you submit your abstract, do not
forget to specify the workshop.

Confirmed speakers (in alphabetic order):

Tamsin Blaxter (University of Cambridge): Contact ↔ analogy ↔ innovation:
mapping cascades in the loss of the Middle Norwegian nominative

John Hawkins (University of Cambridge) & Luna Filipovic (University of East
Anglia): Bilingualism-induced language change: What can change, when and why?

Rena Torres Cacoullos (Penn State University) & Catherine Travis (Australian
National University): Changing modals, changing mores: Obligation in
Australian English across real and apparent time.

Donald Tuten (Emory College, Atlanta): Integrating sociodemographic and
sociocultural factors in contact-based accounts of actuation.

Anne-France Pinget (University of Utrecht): Sound change in present-day Dutch:
a variationist, synchronic approach to the actuation problem.

To optimize the coherence of the volume and the quality of the workshop
participants are asked to circulate a draft of their contributions before the
workshop. First drafts and workshop discussions are to form the basis of
chapter contributions to a thematic volume on the actuation problem. Our
proposal for a thematic volume has already been accepted in the open access
series Conceptual Foundations of Language Science (Language Science Press).
The volume is to contain short and accessible yet data-driven contributions on
the actuation problem from different theoretical and methodological angles.
Please contact us for more information.

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