34.2963, Calls: Passive and Passivization Across Languages in Dynamic and Typological Perspectives: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges

Tue Oct 10 18:05:08 UTC 2023

LINGUIST List: Vol-34-2963. Tue Oct 10 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.2963, Calls: Passive and Passivization Across Languages in Dynamic and Typological Perspectives: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges

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Date: 09-Oct-2023
From: Piotr Sobotka [sle.passive at ispan.edu.pl]
Subject: Passive and Passivization Across Languages in Dynamic and Typological Perspectives: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges

Full Title: Passive and passivization across languages in dynamic and
typological perspectives: conceptual and methodological challenges

Date: 21-Aug-2024 - 24-Aug-2024
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Contact Person: Dominika Skrzypek
Meeting Email: sle.passive at ispan.edu.pl
Web Site: https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2024/

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Historical Linguistics;
Semantics; Syntax; Typology
Subject Language(s): English (eng)

Call Deadline: 05-Nov-2023

Meeting Description:

Proposed workshop at the 57th SLE Annual Meeting

Call for Papers:

Voice is one of the most extensively studied grammatical categories,
both from purely formal and from a typological perspective, including
semantic and pragmatic perspectives. A large body of extant
publications reveal significant cross-linguistic variation of what is
classified as passive constructions and what constitutes their
properties (Croft 1994; Givón 1990; Keenan 1985; Kemmer 1993; Klaiman
1991;  Palmer 1994; Shibatani 1985; 2006; Siewierska 1984; Kittilä and
Zúñiga 2019; Wiemer 2011). What these studies have in common is that
the passive construction is typically defined through a comparison
with its active counterpart (e.g., Dik 1989; Payne 1997), which in
turn follows from the syntactic correspondence between the subject of
the passive clause and the object of the active, as well as the
syntactic correspondence between the subject of the active clause and
the (usually optional) oblique agent phrase in the passive. Siewierska
(1984) is straightforward when she says that we talk about the passive
when "the event or action expressed is brought about by some person or
thing that is not the passive subject, but the subject of the
corresponding active, and that the person or thing if not overt is at
least strongly implied" (Siewierska 1984: 256). As a result, the
active and the passive are seen as each others’ opposites, and the
syntactic correspondence is given more prominence than other
differences, such as impersonalisation (or agent-defocusing; see in
particular Shibatani 1985), inactivisation (Haspelmath 1990) or
topicality change (Givón 1979). Furthermore, a number of constructions
are either not included in the studies of voice (e.g. Crystal (2003)
does not definition recognize reflexives as proper voice
constructions) or reference to them is simply avoided.
A formal and syntax-oriented definition of a passive construction is
not operational in a number of studies, in particular those that are
oriented typologically or diachronically. When incipient passives are
studied, it is not always possible to draw a clear-cut boundary
between the active and the passive and we may expect to find ambiguous
cases, difficult to classify as either passive or active (or middle).
What we need is a more nuanced tool which enables us to see voice as a
gradient rather than an absolute phenomenon from a dynamic view
(Toyota 2008), to classify the forms on a scale rather than place them
in two distinct classes.

Specific research questions to be addressed include (but are not
limited to):
Linguistic theories that can shed light onto the nature of
passivization
The emergence and development of passive voice and its possible paths
of grammaticalization
The links between formal and semantic aspects of passivization
Medio-passive voice and its sentence function in diachronic
perspectives
Categorial shifts: from participles to adjectives

For this workshop, we invite both empirically-based and
theoretically-oriented studies, with a special focus on methodological
approaches (theory-based, corpus-based or experimental) to unlock the
category of voice, in particular in the domain of diachronic and
typological linguistics. We welcome all studies highlighting the
gradient nature of voice; case studies on understudied developments of
passive constructions, as well as from understudied languages are
particularly welcome.
Please send an anonymous abstract of max. 300 words (including
examples and excluding references) before November 5, 2023 to
sle.passive at ispan.edu.pl. In a separate file, send us a cover sheet
including your name, affiliation, and title.

Notifications of inclusion into the WS proposal will be sent by
November 20, 2023, and the notification of the workshop by SLE is
expected one month later. If it is accepted, participants will be
asked to submit a full abstract by January 15, 2024. See details on
the conference website: https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2024/

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