32.3949, Calls: Linguistic Theories/USA

Wed Dec 15 07:09:08 UTC 2021

LINGUIST List: Vol-32-3949. Wed Dec 15 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.3949, Calls: Linguistic Theories/USA

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Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2021 02:08:41
From: Adina Camelia Bleotu [cameliableotu at gmail.com]
Subject: Jabberwocky Words in Linguistics (Online)

Full Title: Jabberwocky Words in Linguistics (Online) 

Date: 11-Feb-2022 - 12-Feb-2022
Location: Online, Bucharest, Amherst, USA 
Contact Person: Adina Camelia Bleotu
Meeting Email: cameliableotu at gmail.com

Linguistic Field(s): Linguistic Theories 

Call Deadline: 03-Jan-2022 

Meeting Description:

The current online workshop is co-organized by Adina Camelia Bleotu
(University of Bucharest) and Deborah Foucault (University of Massachusetts
Amherst). It will be a combination of refereed presentations and invited
talks. It aims at bringing into focus research which sheds light on linguistic
structures/phenomena by means of non-existent words. The workshop welcomes
research making use of possible nonce words, i.e., words which happen not to
be part of the current language but could potentially exist (such as ''blick''
in ''The man blicked yesterday''). Previous experimental work has used nonce
words to investigate how children acquire language. In particular, nonce words
have been employed to investigate the syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis,
according to which children use syntactic cues to get to the meaning of words.
The hypothesis originates as early as 1957, when Robert Brown showed
experimentally that preschool-aged children could use their knowledge of
different parts of speech to distinguish the meaning of nonsense words in
English (''Do you see any/ a sib?'', ''What is sibbing?''). Later, Gleitman
(1990) coined the term ''syntactic bootstrapping'', and further on stressed
the importance of syntactic cues in acquisition. Interesting experimental work
further ensued (Naigles, 1990; Soja, 1992; Höhle et al., 2004; Cristophe et
al., 2008; Syrrett et. al., 2010; Yuan & Fisher, 2012; Jin & Fisher, 2014; He
& Lidz, 2017; Cao & Lewis, 2021; Huang et al., 2021; a.o.): to elaborate on
one influential work, Naigles (1990) showed by means of a (video-based)
eye-tracking paradigm that 2-year-olds who hear ''The duck is kradding'' the
rabbit interpreted ''kradding'' as the act of the duck pushing on the rabbit,
whereas 2-year-olds who hear ''The duck and the rabbit are kradding''
interpret ''kradding'' as the act of both animals doing something (arm
waving). The nonce paradigm has the advantage of eliminating lexical biases
created by existent words in the lexicon, and, instead, isolating the issue of
interest. In addition to their relevance for the acquisition of (lexical)
semantics, nonce words have also been employed to investigate the acquisition
of morphology. The famous Wug Test, created by Jean Berko Gleason in 1958 and
replicated multiple times, used nonce words to explore children’s acquisition
of plural morphology (''one wug-two wugs''), possessives (''wug’s'',
''wugs’'') and verbal morphology (''He zibs''). We are interested in recent
experimental work which uses nonce words as a tool to investigate the
acquisition of lexical and functional items. Apart from employing novel words
within an existing language, another method which has become a useful tool in
exploring linguistic universals is artificial language learning: participants
have to learn a novel artificial grammar, and their perfomance can give useful
information about innate linguistic biases (Culbertson, Smolensky, & Legendre,
2012; Ettlinger, Bradlow, & Wong, 2014; Finley & Badecker, 2009; a.o.). For
instance, Culbertson et al. (2012, 2015, 2017, 2020) have shown that child and
adult learners are biased in favor of harmonic word patterns (either
prenominal harmonic orders like Adj N, Num N or postnominal harmonic orders
like N Adj, N Num), and that this bias holds even when learner’s native
language is non-harmonic (like French or Hebrew, which are N Adj, Num N). We
thus also welcome papers making use of artificial language learning to
investigate linguistic principles. Other areas of interest for the workshop
involve novel words which are used spontaneously by certain individual
speakers (such as the verb ''to giraffe'' in ''The girl liked to giraffe in
the morning''), in a similar way to already existing denominal verbs (Hale &
Keyser 2002; Harley 2005) or impossible words which can simply not exist in
the language (such as *''faller'' or *''dier'', for instance), given certain
structural constraints which limit the domain of creativity (Roeper, 1987).

Invited speakers (in alphabetical order):

Jennifer Culbertson (University of Edinburgh) and Alexander Martin (Université
de Paris)
Brian Dillon (University of Massachusetts Amherst) and Jon Burnsky (University
of Massachusetts Amherst)
Heidi Harley (University of Arizona)
Jeff Lidz (University of Maryland)
Letitia Naigles (University of Connecticut)
Emma Nguyen (University of California, Irvine)
Tom Roeper (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Kristen Syrett (Rutgers University)
Lyn Tieu (Western Sydney University)

Call for Papers:

We welcome experimental papers employing nonce words within various
methodologies (act-out tasks, truth value judgment tasks, eye-tracking,
story-telling, artificial language learning, a.o.) to investigate certain
linguistic phenomena/structures (first and second language acquisition,
language processing, online and offline methodological issues, a.o.). We also
welcome corpus and theoretical work which provides new insight into how novel
words are created and what this can tell us about the linguistic mechanisms
people make use of. We invite abstracts for 30-minute talks (with a 10-minute
discussion included). Abstracts should be no longer than 500 words in a font
size no less than 12pt, with an additional page including examples, figures
and references. Abstracts should be anonymous. Contact details (author’s name
and affiliation) and the title of the presentation should be included in the
accompanying email.

Please send your abstract (PDF format) to cameliableotu at gmail.com,
dfoucaulteth at umass.edu

Important Dates:
Deadline for abstract submission: 3 January 2022
Notification of acceptance: 20 January 2022
Workshop: 11 or 12 February 2022

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