34.1310, Calls: Workshop "Efficiency in grammar: Patterns and Explanations"

Tue Apr 25 00:05:02 UTC 2023

LINGUIST List: Vol-34-1310. Tue Apr 25 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.1310, Calls: Workshop "Efficiency in grammar: Patterns and Explanations"

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Date: 24-Apr-2023
From: Laura Becker [laura.becker at linguistik.uni-freiburg.de]
Subject: Workshop "Efficiency in grammar: Patterns and Explanations"

Full Title: Workshop "Efficiency in grammar: Patterns and
Explanations"

Date: 05-Jul-2023 - 05-Jul-2023
Location: Freiburg, Germany
Contact Person: Laura Becker
Meeting Email: laura.becker at linguistik.uni-freiburg.de
Web Site: https://laurabecker.gitlab.io/workshop.html

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Morphology; Phonetics;
Text/Corpus Linguistics; Typology

Call Deadline: 14-May-2023

Meeting Description:

The purpose of this workshop is to take stock of the role of
efficiency in explaining patterns in grammar. This includes evaluating
the empirical evidence for different types of efficiency (and the lack
thereof) in grammatical structures, as well as the status of
efficiency as an explanatory factor for grammatical structures within
and across languages. The workshop aims at connecting researchers from
the areas of typology, corpus linguistics, phonetics, morphology and
syntax in order to bring together different perspectives on the role
of efficiency in grammar.

The workshop will take place at the University of Freiburg and is
primarily planned as an in-person meeting. However, if desired, we
will offer a hybrid format to accommodate online presentations.

Meeting Website: https://laurabecker.gitlab.io/workshop.html

2nd Call for Papers:

--- EXTENDED DEADLINE ---

Efficiency has been shown to be of high importance in human
communication in various ways, allowing to save efforts with maximal
benefits of successful transfer of information in the production and
processing of speech (e.g. Levshina 2022).

Already Zipf (1935) showed that more frequent or predictable
expressions tend to be shorter than equivalent less frequent or
predictable grammatical expressions. Such patterns are efficient as
they allow us to save production and processing costs with frequent
expressions while maintaining successful communication. Related to
that, work from an information-theoretic perspective has shown robust
crosslinguistic evidence for a preference towards uniform information
density (e.g. Jaeger 2010). We also coding efficiency with grammatical
expressions across languages. This was already noted by Greenberg
(1966), who showed that the more frequent function (e.g. singular)
tends to have no overt or shorter markers as opposed to the less
frequent functions (e.g. plural). Similar associations between the
frequency/predictability and the length of a grammatical marker were
found in recent crosslinguistic, quantitative corpus studies (e.g.
Guzmán Naranjo & Becker 2021). Research in phonetics has also shown
that frequency, predictability and informativity can impact the
acoustic duration of lexical and grammatical elements (e.g. Cohen
Priva 2008; Jurafsky et al. 2001; Seyfarth 2014). Coding efficiency is
also at play in reference tracking, where referents can be realized
through longer (lexical) and shorter (pronominal or zero) forms,
depending on their contextual predictability (e.g. Ariel 1990).

Efficiency has also been related to certain types of word order
preferences. Preferred word orders have been argued to involve lower
production and processing costs compared to others. It is well known
that minimal syntactic domains tend to be preferred over longer
dependencies in the world's languages (e.g. Dryer 1992; Hawkins 2014).
This is efficient, as minimal structures to be held in the working
memory require less resources than larger structures during language
production and processing. Another way in which efficiency has been
argued to account for word order relates to the accessibility of
syntactic units. More specifically, there is a crosslinguistic
preference for shorter or simpler elements to precede longer or
heavier ones (cf. Hawkins 2014), which saves processing cost (cf.
MacDonald 2013).

Yet, we are still far from understanding in when and how efficient
probabilistic variation becomes a part of grammar and leads to
typological preferences for efficient grammatical patterns. Related to
that, the explanatory role of efficiency for crosslinguistic
preferences is still very much under debate in typology. Some
researchers view communicative efficiency as the driver of diachronic
developments towards efficient patterns and take efficient coding as
an attractor state (e.g. Haspelmath 2021; Seržant & Moroz 2022).
Others have argued for efficient patterns to be the outcome of
several, unrelated diachronic processes that do not involve efficiency
as the driver of change (e.g. Becker 2022; Cristofaro 2019, 2021).

We invite the submission of abstracts concerned with – including but
not limited to – the following issues:
* evidence for different types of efficiency in grammar within and
across languages (e.g. from psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics or
typology)
* evidence for grammatical phenomena where efficiency plays no role /
only a minor role
* other factors that efficiency interacts with
* how and under which circumstances efficient grammatical structures
develop
* efficiency as an explanatory factor for grammatical structure(s)
within and across languages?

Anonymized abstracts of max. 500 words (excluding examples, tables,
references) should be submitted in PDF format. Please send the
abstract to laura.becker at linguistik.uni-freiburg.de in PDF format by
May 14, 2023.

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