32.3778, Calls: General Linguistics/Belgium

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-32-3778. Fri Dec 03 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.3778, Calls: General Linguistics/Belgium

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Date: Fri, 03 Dec 2021 22:37:25
From: Peter Lauwers [peter.lauwers at ugent.be]
Subject: Workshop on Syntactic Productivity

 
Full Title: Workshop on Syntactic Productivity 

Date: 30-Jun-2022 - 02-Jul-2022
Location: Ghent, Belgium 
Contact Person: Peter Lauwers
Meeting Email: peter.lauwers at ugent.be
Web Site: https://www.languageproductivity.ugent.be/workshop-syntactic-productivity/ 

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 20-Jan-2022 

Meeting Description:

On the occasion of the Grammar and Corpora Conference,  the Language
Productivity @ Work Consortium organizes a workshop on productivity of
syntactic constructions.
When speakers produce or interpret language structures, they rely on a
structured inventory of grammatical rules or patterns. Some of these are
highly productive: they have a broad domain of application and are readily
available to coin new expressions.
This phenomenon has long been observed in morphology. For instance, speakers
of Dutch can readily apply the morphological rule Verb+baar to create new
adjectives meaning ‘that can be Verb-ed’, such as in een twitter·baar stuk
tekst ‘a twitterable text chunk‘. By contrast, other rules such as
Verb+(e)lijk, as in ondraag·lijk ‘unbearable’ are not productive (Booij 2002).
As a consequence, *twitter·lijk is completely out. But also syntactic rules
and constructions can be productive to varying degrees, since they can be
applied to a range of words (which fill one or more slots), including
neologisms. For instance, the transitive construction X+Verb+Y (e.g. to eat an
apple), which accepts many verbs, is far more productive than the
nominative-genitive construction in Modern German, which is restricted to only
a handful of verbs (Barðdal 2008: 150), one of which is gedenken (Wir gedenken
der Opfer ‘We remember the victims’).
Productivity is an abstract property of linguistic structures that forms part
of the implicit knowledge speakers have about a language. Not only does it
play a fundamental role in synchronic language description, it is also a
crucial concept in language change (i.a. Hilpert 2013, Traugott & Trousdale
2013, Perek 2016) and language acquisition (Tomasello 2003; Hartsuiker &
Bernolet 2017). Up until the present day, however, the phenomenon of
productivity is poorly understood, especially with regard to syntactic
constructions.

The workshop aims to address the following questions:

1. What are the different guises of productivity?
Productivity is a theoretical construct that can only be observed indirectly,
i.e. when it is “at work”. Traditionally, corpus linguists have inferred
productivity from the sum of utterances produced by the speakers of a
language, i.e. from language usage (e.g. Baayen 1991, Zeldes 2012).  Yet, how
do these usage data match with language intuitions as measured via
acceptability ratings? And how are they processed in on-line adult speech,
both in production and comprehension? And what about speaker-related
differences? 

2. How can we measure (aspects of) productivity?
Some of these conceptual problems boil down to more technical issues about the
interrelations between corpus-based metrics (such as type/token ratio,
hapax/token ratio, hapax/type ratio, etc.) and how they capture distinct
dimensions of productivity (i.a. Baayen 1992, 2001, 2009; Barðdal 2008; Zeldes
2012; Van Wettere 2021). Diachronically, an intriguing question is that of how
type frequency relates to (changing) (token) frequency of each of the types
and of the construction as a whole (cf. Feltgen 2020). Another important
question is how extensibility is affected by strong entrenchment of a very
small number of highly token-frequent fillers, which might be considered a
factor of anti-productivity (cf. Barðdal 2008: 49, referring i.a. to Bybee
2001: 118–126).

3. What are the differences between morphological and syntactic productivity?

4. How does semantics affect productivity?
What is the role of semantic similarity to already attested fillers (Barðdal
2008, Suttle & Goldberg 2011)? And what about the impact of semantic
variability (cf. Goldberg 2019), including the semantic range and density of
the filler spectrum?

Other topics might also be proposed, as long as they are relevant for a better
understanding of productivity.

A more detailed description can be found at
https://www.languageproductivity.ugent.be/workshop-syntactic-productivity/


Call for Papers:

We invite submissions for 20-minute oral presentations (plus 10 minutes for
discussion). The conference language is English.

Deadline for abstract submission is 20 January 2022. Notification of
acceptation/rejection will be sent out by 20 February 2022.

Abstracts should be fully anonymous and clearly state the research
question(s), approach, method, data, and (expected) results.

They should not exceed 500 words, excluding data, figures, and references. All
submissions will be reviewed anonymously by at least two reviewers.

Abstracts should be submitted through languageproductivity at ugent.be

Organisers: Language productivity at work, BOF UGent, concerted research action




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