34.3584, Calls: Workshop on Legacy Materials as Data Sources for Language Description and Documentation

Tue Nov 28 17:05:02 UTC 2023

LINGUIST List: Vol-34-3584. Tue Nov 28 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.3584, Calls: Workshop on Legacy Materials as Data Sources for Language Description and Documentation

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Date: 27-Nov-2023
From: Aimée Lahaussois [aimee.lahaussois at cnrs.fr]
Subject: Workshop on Legacy Materials as Data Sources for Language Description and Documentation

Full Title: Workshop on Legacy materials as data sources for language
description and documentation

Date: 11-Apr-2024 - 12-Apr-2024
Location: Paris, France
Contact Person: Aimée Lahaussois
Meeting Email: aimee.lahaussois at cnrs.fr

Linguistic Field(s): History of Linguistics; Language Documentation;
Typology

Call Deadline: 15-Jan-2024

Meeting Description:

This workshop, to be held on April 11th and 12th 2024 in Paris, will
bring together descriptive linguists who engage with legacy materials
on their language (or language group) of specialization. The workshop
will be co-hosted by the Histoire des théories linguistiques research
group and the Cambridge Endangered Languages and Cultures Group and
thus provide opportunities for exchange between historians of
linguistics, field linguists and linguists working with endangered
languages.

Call for Papers:

This workshop, to be held on April 11th and 12th 2024 in Paris, will
bring together descriptive linguists who engage with legacy materials
on their language (or language group) of specialization. The workshop
will be co-hosted by the Histoire des théories linguistiques research
group and the Cambridge Endangered Languages and Cultures Group and
thus provide opportunities for exchange between historians of
linguistics, field linguists and linguists working with endangered
languages.

For linguists involved in language description and documentation, the
multiple crises of the last few years have in some cases made access
to field sites difficult. This has often led to a renewed interest in
mining earlier descriptive materials (broadly defined here as those
produced prior to the 1960's and to the appearance of the first field
manuals for descriptive linguistics) to complement field data
collected in person. Such legacy sources, which can result from
colonial, missionary, scientific enterprises, among others, can be
challenging to use for a number of reasons: modern-trained linguists
may question their reliability and methodological biases, and be faced
with unfamiliar terminology, ontological systems, frameworks,
presentation style, typographies, etc.

Yet these materials can often contribute in a tangible way to
contemporary language analyses: they may contain data which can
provide insights for diachronic work; otherwise inaccessible lexical
data; textual materials in registers or genres missing from the
contemporary corpus; morphological data necessary to complete
paradigms. At the meta-grammaticographical level, these resources are
likely to inform us about earlier data collection methodology, the
development of data annotation and glossing practices, the evolution
of grammatical categories and their interrelations, approaches to
language description (and notably the question of onomasiology vs.
semasiology), and the changing role of the various subfields of
linguistics in descriptive work, among others.

Some of the questions we will explore during this workshop are:
•       What specific issues have descriptive linguists been faced
with in using older materials? What solutions have they arrived at to
resolve such issues?
•       What sorts of elements can be gleaned from the use of such
older materials, in terms of the evolution of the practice of
grammar-writing and the methodology of data collection?
•       What solutions can historians of linguistics, who are deeply
familiar with such materials, bring to the table, through
collaboration with descriptive linguists and typologists, to make the
materials more accessible?
•       What does using older descriptive materials reveal about our
current perspectives on what makes a “good” grammatical description?

If interested, please send a 300-word abstract to
aimee.lahaussois at cnrs.fr by January 15th, 2024.

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