33.603, Calls: Language Documentation, Text/Corpus Linguistics, Typology/USA
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LINGUIST List: Vol-33-603. Wed Feb 16 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.
Subject: 33.603, Calls: Language Documentation, Text/Corpus Linguistics, Typology/USA
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Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2022 17:30:25
From: Frank Seifart [seifart at leibniz-zas.de]
Subject: Spoken- and Signed-language Corpus Studies in Linguistic Typology - a workshop at ALT 2022
Full Title: Spoken- and Signed-language Corpus Studies in Linguistic Typology - a workshop at ALT 2022
Date: 15-Dec-2022 - 17-Dec-2022
Location: University of Texas at Austin, USA
Contact Person: Frank Seifart
Meeting Email: seifart at leibniz-zas.de
Web Site: https://sites.google.com/view/alt2022/workshops
Linguistic Field(s): Language Documentation; Text/Corpus Linguistics; Typology
Call Deadline: 01-Apr-2022
Meeting Description:
Recent years have seen a surge in corpus-based research in linguistic typology
(cf. Levshina 2021a; Schnell & Schiborr 2022 for recent overviews). One
prominent line of work takes up long-standing questions in linguistic
typology, e.g. in word order typology (Greenberg 1963), which is notoriously
subject to intra-language variation (cf. Futrell et al 2020; Gerdes et al.
2020; Wälchli 2009), and where variability is found to be constrained by
principles of efficiency (Ying et al 2021; Levshina 2019; 2021b; Blasi et al.
2019; Futrell et al 2015; 2020). Another such example is marking asymmetries
(Greenberg 1966), which some corpus studies explain in terms of the
form-frequency correspondence hypothesis (Haspelmath 2021), much in the spirit
of Zipf (1935). What most of these studies have in common is that they draw
primarily on multilingual written-language corpora, e.g. Universal
Dependencies (UDs 2.8 Zeman et al 2021), the Parallel Bible Corpus (PBC; Mayer
& Cysouw 2014), or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR; cf. Bentz
& Ferrer-i-Cancho 2016). Typological studies based on spoken-language corpora
are still comparatively rare. Notable exceptions include Bickel (2003) and
Stoll & Bickel’s (2009) studies of referential density, as well as research
into sentence structure and information packaging, e.g. the recent critical
assessments of Du Bois’ (1987) seminal hypothesis of preferred argument
structure (cf. Schnell et al. 2021; Haig & Schnell 2016). Some recent research
also takes spoken-language prosodic patterns into account, e.g. alternations
in speech rate and disfluencies such as pausing. While these latter phenomena
are typically not in the purview of typology as such, findings of speech rate
alternations and disfluencies are relevant for typology in explaining
tendencies of structural unit formation, e.g. the suffixing preference
(Seifart et al 2018; Seifart & Bickel 2017; Himmelmann 2014; Bybee et al.
1990; Cutler et al 1985), syllable complexity (Coupé et al. 2019), prosodic
units (Seifart et al. 2021), as well as information packaging from an
interactional perspective (Ozerov 2021a, 2021b). Signed-language corpora are
to date even more underrepresented, but see Schembri et al. (2005) for a
comparative study of motion verbs and more recently Hodge et al. (2019) for a
study of reference production in Auslan. These recent studies illustrate a
turning point in linguistic typology, following several initiatives aimed at
building, documenting, and sharing multilingual databases consisting of
spoken- and signed-language corpora. The stakes of this fundamental change are
at the heart of this workshop proposal.
The purpose of this workshop is to provide a forum for discussion of ongoing
corpus-based typological work that is primarily based on spoken- or
signed-language corpora, and that addresses questions of efficiency,
information-theoretic considerations in language production, cross-linguistic
phonetic-prosodic patterns, the cognitive-articulatory basis of speech
production, etc. Also relevant here are studies that address specific
comparisons of mode differences. A further goal is to bring to the fore the
key role of language acquisition studies of spoken and signed languages,
including languages that have received much less attention in acquisition
research than better-studied languages (but see Moran et al 2016; Stoll &
Lieven 2014). This workshop will also address methodological and epistemic
questions such as the bottom-up perspective of corpus-based typology that it
shares with documentary linguistics (Himmelmann 1998) as well as modern
distributional typology and its emphasis on fine-grained low-level categories
(Bickel 2015, 2009, 2007; Levinson & Evans 2010). Likewise, the role of
external factors and intra- vs. inter-language variation, e.g. idiolectal or
register variation, are to be addressed (cf. Barth et al 2021).
Call for Papers:
The purpose of this workshop is to provide a forum for discussion of ongoing
corpus-based typological work that is primarily based on spoken- or
signed-language corpora, and that addresses questions of efficiency,
information-theoretic considerations in language production, cross-linguistic
phonetic-prosodic patterns, the cognitive-articulatory basis of speech
production, etc. Also relevant are studies that address specific comparisons
of mode differences. A further goal is to bring to the fore the key role of
language acquisition studies of spoken and signed languages. This workshop
will showcase the enormous relevance of spoken- and signed language production
research for linguistic typology and to establish an ongoing exchange between
researchers in this area and beyond on matters of development and analysis of
spoken and signed corpora.
We welcome contributions of the following kind and on related topics:
- Comparative studies into any area of linguistic and discourse structure
based on spoken- or signed-language corpora
- Chunking of speech/signing and its relationship with discourse planning
and/or the formation of linguistic units
- Studies in conversation analysis in spoken and/or signed languages
- Corpus-based studies of language acquisition of under-studied spoken or
signed languages, or comparisons thereof
- Comparative studies that explicitly address mode differences and their
effects on language production and evolution
- Comparative corpus-phonetic studies addressing typological variation or
putative universals
- Reports on (multilingual) corpus building projects (should include
showcase/proof-of-concept study)
- We welcome studies using any multilingual spoken or signed corpora,
including, but not limited to, Multi-CAST
(https://multicast.aspra.uni-bamberg.de), DoReCo (http://doreco.info/) or
SCOPIC (https://scopicproject.wordpress.com). Note that these three will be
significantly enhanced by addition of new languages in the course of 2022 (for
updates, please contact the convenors D. Barth, L. Paschen, F. Pellegrino, M.
Stave, S. Schnell & F. Seifart)
Email seifart at leibniz-zas.de for submission information.
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