34.1023, Calls: Workshop "Efficiency in grammar: Patterns and Explanations"

Sat Mar 25 05:05:02 UTC 2023

LINGUIST List: Vol-34-1023. Sat Mar 25 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.1023, Calls: Workshop "Efficiency in grammar: Patterns and Explanations"

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Date: 
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: 01-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

Call for Papers:

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 (cf. Fedzechkina 2014; Gibson et al. 2019;
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 (cf.
Guzmán Naranjo & Becker 2021, Stave et al. 2021). Research in
phonetics has also shown that frequency, predictability and
informativity can impact the acoustic duration of lexical and
grammatical elements (e.g. Barth 2019; Bell et al. 2009; 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 (c.f. Chafe 1976; Ariel 1990).

Efficiency has also been related to certain types of word order
preferences across languages. Preferred word orders have been argued
to involve lower production and processing costs compared to other
word orders. It is well known that minimal syntactic domains or
dependencies tend to be preferred over longer dependencies in the
world's languages (e.g. Dryer 1992; Futrell et al. 2015; Gibson 1998;
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. Behagel 1909/10; 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; Kiparsky 2008; 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?

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