33.1349, Calls: Sociolinguistics/Italy

Fri Apr 15 10:07:27 UTC 2022

LINGUIST List: Vol-33-1349. Fri Apr 15 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.1349, Calls: Sociolinguistics/Italy

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Date: Fri, 15 Apr 2022 06:03:55
From: Pierpaolo Di Carlo [pierpaol at buffalo.edu]
Subject: Language Contact and Non-convergent change in West Africa

Full Title: Language Contact and Non-convergent change in West Africa 

Date: 21-Sep-2022 - 23-Sep-2022
Location: Naples, Italy 
Contact Person: Pierpaolo Di Carlo
Meeting Email: pierpaol at buffalo.edu
Web Site: https://www.unior.it/ricerca/26771/3/4th-symposium-on-west-african-languages-21-23-september-2022.html 

Linguistic Field(s): Sociolinguistics 

Call Deadline: 31-May-2022 

Meeting Description:

The intended focus of the workshop is on situations of language contact among
African languages in non-urban settings. Work done in urban settings as well
as contributions in domains not covered by the topics listed above will be
considered if relevant to the overall themes of the workshop. For instance,
cases of (small-scale) multilingualism where language ideologies stress group
membership as the major factor influencing linguistic behavior—such as, e.g.,
in situations where codeswitching is socially constrained or stigmatized—are
relevant to the panel as they might shed light on social settings favoring the
maintenance or amplification of linguistic differences between the codes
associated with distinct social groups.

Call for Papers:

We invite abstracts for 20-minute presentations in a panel on ''Language
contact and non-convergent change in West Africa'' at the 4th Symposium on
West African Languages (SyWAL 2022). The 4th Symposium on West African
Languages (SyWAL2022) will be located in Naples and will take place on the
premises of the University of Naples “L’Orientale”.

Please find below the Call for papers.

It is normally assumed that contact leads to convergence among languages. Most
of the cases instantiating non-convergent patterns have been considered
fundamentally extraneous to the study of language contact dynamics—such as in
cases of language differentiation driven by conscious nationalistic efforts,
especially in state-based societies—or exceptional and, therefore, irrelevant
in the big picture of contact-induced change. Recent research, however, seems
to indicate that contact may induce phenomena of non-convergence—including
both stability and divergence—and that these may not be as unusual as existing
scholarship on language change would suggest. This growing inventory features
cases from Australia, Melanesia, Southeast Asia, South America, and Europe
(for overviews, see Evans 2019 and Braunmüller et al. 2014). Evidence from
West African languages is still extremely scarce, but there appear to be no
objective reasons why such phenomena should be so rare in this part of the
world. This panel aims to provide an opportunity for researchers to present
studies of language contact in West Africa in which one or more of the
languages involved display features that are both genealogically and areally
unexpected. Phenomena of this kind may take many different forms (see
references) and contributions may cover any of the following and beyond:
- Cases of languages in contact that show convergent patterns at some level
(e.g. phonology) and divergent patterns at some other level (e.g. lexicon or
morphology).  
- Analyses focused on a single language in which non-marginal features are
observed that can reasonably be demonstrated to be neither inherited nor due
to convergence towards one of the languages with which it is or has been in
contact.
- Cases of languages in contact displaying strikingly opposing features, such
as, e.g., distinctive marking strategies for loanwords; distinctive
suprasegmental phonology within an otherwise very similar segmental phonology;
conspicuously different distribution of nouns across noun classes that are
otherwise marked in very similar ways; morphological patterns in one language
that result in paradigms of different shapes than what is found in nearby
languages; presence in one language of phonological segments that are rare in
local, or even cross-linguistic, terms; etc. 
- Situations of contact in which languages show lower degrees of structural or
lexical borrowing than expected
- Comparative analyses of phonological, morphological, morphosyntactic, or
lexical features in two or more languages in contact that may have reasonably
developed through either maintenance of distinctiveness or divergence among
the languages.
- Cases of linguistic esoterogeny—i.e. of deliberate change of a language
aiming to make it harder to learn for outsiders.

Abstract submission deadline: 31 May 2022
Notification of acceptance: 15 June 2022
For more information, please contact the convenors:
pierpaol at buffalo.edu, pius.akumbu at cnrs.fr, jcgood at buffalo.edu,
roland.kiessling at uni-hamburg.de
You can find the information on submitting an abstract on the SYWAL2022 page:
https://www.unior.it/ricerca/26771/3/4th-symposium-on-west-african-languages-2
1-23-september-2022.html

References
Braunmüller, Kurt, Steffen Höder & Karoline Kühl (eds). 2014. Stability and
divergence in language contact. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Evans, Nicholas. 2019. Linguistic divergence under contact. In M. Cennamo & C.
Fabrizio (eds.) Historical Linguistics 2015: Selected papers from the 22nd
International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Naples, 27-31 July 2015,
564–591. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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