33.3650, Calls: Typology/Italy

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-33-3650. Fri Nov 25 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.3650, Calls: Typology/Italy

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Date: 
From: Guglielmo Inglese [guglielmo.inglese at unito.it]
Subject: Diachronic and Typological Perspectives on Anticausativization


Full Title: Diachronic and Typological Perspectives on
Anticausativization

Date: 09-Nov-2023 - 09-Nov-2023
Location: Università di Torino, Italy
Contact Person: Guglielmo Inglese
Meeting Email: guglielmo.inglese at unito.it
Web Site: https://sites.google.com/view/diatypantc2023/home-page

Linguistic Field(s): Typology

Call Deadline: 31-Mar-2023

Meeting Description:

The (anti)causative alternation is a transitivity alternation
concerned with how languages express externally caused (CAUSAL) vs.
spontaneously occurring (NONCAUSAL) events. Typologists have shown
that languages resort to three main coding patterns to express such
alternations (see Tubino-Blanco 2020):

(i) CAUSATIVE: the causal member is overtly marked, Turkish öl- ‘die’
vs. öl-dür- ‘kill’
(ii) ANTICAUSATIVE: the noncausal member is marked, Italian
scioglier-si ‘melt (intr.)’ vs. sciogliere ‘melt (tr.)’
(iii) EQUIPOLLENT: both members are equally marked, Yaqui
(Uto-Aztecan) bee-te ‘burn (intr.)’ vs. bee-ta ‘burn (tr.)’

Despite the structural parallelism, it has been pointed out that
causative and anticausative markers (AMs) show a cross-linguistically
unbalanced distribution. Not only are AMs typologically less frequent
than causatives, but it is also rare for AMs to outnumber causatives
in the lexicon of individual languages (Nichols et al. 2004). In fact,
the very existence of the anticausative pattern, in which the
semantically simpler member of the alternation receives a
morphologically more complex marking, constitutes a puzzle, as it
violates the iconicity principle (Haspelmath 2016: 593). Nevertheless
AMs do exist, and, strikingly, they appear to be a relatively stable
linguistic trait over time (e.g., Wichmann 2015).

Within individual languages, the distribution of AMs is not random, as
some verbs trigger AMs more frequently than others. To explain these
distributions, scholars have resorted to either verb semantics or
frequency effects. Semantics-based accounts appeal to notions such as
spontaneity (Haspelmath 1987) and claim that verbs lexicalizing events
less likely to occur spontaneously are more likely to trigger AMs,
because higher cognitive markedness entails higher structural
markedness (Haspelmath 1993: 106). Frequency-based approaches explain
marking asymmetries as mirroring frequency asymmetries, based on the
assumption that higher usage frequency items are more predictable and
thus favor shorter coding (Haspelmath 2021). This means that verbs
that more routinely occur in noncausal contexts are less likely to
receive AMs (Haspelmath et al. 2014).

Overall, despite the wealth of (mostly synchronically oriented)
existing research, the fundamental question as to why anticausatives
exist remains open. To understand why anticausativization exists, one
must explore how AMs arise in the first place, at least along two
lines: (i) what are the historical sources of AMs across languages and
(ii) how do AMs historically spread through the verbal lexicon of
individual languages. Concerning (i), typological works mention only
two such sources, reflexives and passives (e.g., Zúñiga & Kittilä
2019: 233), but this seems reductive, as there is evidence for
alternative developments (Bahrt 2021; Inglese 2022). Concerning (ii),
even in languages with ample historical documentation, as e.g.,
Romance languages, we still lack a detailed understanding of how AMs
spread across time and, in particular, whether the lexical spread of
AMs follows proposed generalizations on the distribution of AMs with
particular verb classes, such as the spontaneity scale proposed by
Haspelmath (2016) shown in (1).

(1) TRANSITIVE ‘cut’ > UNERGATIVE ‘talk’ > AUTOMATIC UNACCUSATIVE
‘melt’ > COSTLY UNACCUSATIVE ‘break’ > AGENTFUL ‘be cut’

Call for Papers:

Taking stock of these premises, the goal of this workshop is to offer
a venue for scholars interested in typology and historical linguistics
to develop a new diachronically oriented approach to the study of AMs.
The workshop will be held at the University of Torino (Italy) on the
9th November 2023, and is organized within the project Historical and
typological perspectives on anticausativization, funded by the
University of Torino and carried out in collaboration with KU Leuven.
We welcome contribution addressing (among others) the following
topics:

- description of anticausativization (including equipollent) patterns
in previously undescribed languages;
- sources and grammaticalization of AMs in individual
languages/language families;
- the role of contact and areal convergence in the emergence of AMs;
- detailed historical corpus studies on the distribution of AMs;
- lexical restrictions in the distribution of AMs with specific verb
classes and their historical motivation;
- cross-linguistic corpus-based analyses of the distribution of AMs,
their frequency and productivity;
- diachronic stability of AMs within individual languages and
families;
- loss of AMs.


Submission guidelines
Abstracts should be maximum 1 page long (+ 1 page for data and
references), and should be submitted by email to
guglielmo.inglese at unito.it by 31 March 2023. Acceptance notifications
will be sent no later than 30 April 2023. Please check the workshop’s
website for further information.

Workshop Website
https://sites.google.com/view/diatypantc2023/home-page

Keynote speaker: Johanna Nichols (HSE & University of California,
Berkeley)

Scientific Committee
Bert Cornillie, Lorenzo Ferrarotti, Eugenio Goria, Guglielmo Inglese,
Giulia Mazzola, Ellison Luk, Davide Ricca, Mario Squartini,
Jean-Christope Verstraete

References

Bahrt, Nicklas N. 2021. Voice syncretism. Berlin: Language Science
Press.
Haspelmath, Martin. 1987. Transitivity alternations of the
anticausative type. Köln: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft.
Haspelmath, Martin. 1993. More on the typology of the
inchoative/causative verb alternations. In Bernard Comrie & Maria
Polinsky (eds.), Causatives and Transitivity, 87–120. Amsterdam &
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Haspelmath, Martin. 2016. Universals of causative and anticausative
verb formation and the spontaneity scale. Lingua Posnaniensis 58(2).
33–63.
Haspelmath, Martin. 2021. Explaining grammatical coding asymmetries:
Form–frequency correspondences and predictability. Journal of
Linguistics 57(3). 605–633.
Haspelmath, Martin, Andreea Calude, Michael Spagnol, Heiko Narrog &
Eli̇f Bamyaci. 2014. Coding causal–noncausal verb alternations: A
form–frequency correspondence explanation. Journal of Linguistics
50(3). 587–625.
Inglese, Guglielmo. 2022. Cross-linguistic sources of anticausative
markers. Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads.
Nichols, Johanna, David A. Peterson & Jonathan Barnes. 2004.
Transitivizing and detransitivizing languages. Linguistic Typology
8(2). 149–211.
Tubino-Blanco, Mercedes. 2020. Causative-Inchoative in Morphology.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Wichmann, Søren. 2015. Diachronic stability and typology. In Claire
Bowern & Bethwyn Evans (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Historical
Linguistics, 212–224. London & New York: Routledge.
Zúñiga, Fernando & Seppo Kittilä. 2019. Grammatical Voice. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.



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