ALT 6

Tue May 23 11:19:28 UTC 1995

ALT News No. 6
May 1995

1. Reminders

Those of you

... that are near-members instead of members, please send back the
membership form attached to News 4 and 5 and transfer the
membership fee. If you need a back-copy of News 4 or 5, let us
know.

... that want to present a paper at ALT, your one-page summary,
containing name and address (snail-mail and e-mail if any) and
indication of desired time (30, 45, 60) is still welcomed by Edith
Moravcsik (edith at csd.uwm.edu, fax: (414) 229-6258, Department
of Linguistics, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI
53201-0413, USA), but you have to hurry, the dealine being May
31.

Remember also that ALT will start publishing its own journal,
LINGUISTIC TYPOLOGY, in 1996.  The provisional editorial
board (G. Bossong, N. Evans, A. E. Kibrik, E. A. Moravcsik, M.
Mithun, F. Plank, A. Siewierska, J. van der Auwera) welcomes
submissions, suggestions, review copies, offers to review.  Editorial
address: F. Plank, Sprachwissenschaft, Universitaet Konstanz,
Postfach 5560, D-78434 Konstanz (frans.plank at uni-konstanz.de).

2. ALT 1 - ( = ALT's Inaugural Conference)

Miren L. Onederra (Euskal Filologia Sail, Euskal Herriko
Unibertsitatea, Urkixoko Markesaren k, z/g, E-01006
Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, fvponoll at lg.ehu.es), who is the local
organizer, sent us the following information:

ALT Inaugural Meeting
(K. Mitxelena I. Ihardunaldiak)

7 - 10 September 1995

Filologia eta Geografia-Historia Fakultatea
Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea/Universidad del Pais Vasco
(University of the Basque Country)
Marques de Urquijo, s/n
Vitoria-Gasteiz
Spain

Vitoria-Gasteiz, the capital of the Basque Autonomous Community
(Spain), is a small town of about 200.000 inhabitants. It is
approximately 60 km. from the Atlantic coast. The University
Institute where the meeting will take place (Filologia eta
Geografia-Historia Fakultatea) is right behind the railway station
(starting point of Dato Street, main street of the city).

On transportation:

TRAIN: Coming by train from either Madrid or Barcelona, landing
sites of most international flights, may take from four to six hours.
Information on train time tables can be provided to those interested.

PLANE: There are evening flights from Madrid to Foronda Airport
in Vitoria-Gasteiz every day, and by september there will also be
flights from Barcelona, but these are restricted to Monday, Tuesday
and Wednesday. Most companies will carry you to Sondika airport
in Bilbao. Sondika is about 70 km. away from Vitoria-Gasteiz, and
public transportation, although possible, is somewhat complicated.
We are intending to organize a taxi service for the 7th of September
(this is provisional: the exact date will be fixed as soon as the final
program is ready), so we would recommend that you meet with
other people attending the Conference in Sondika and take a taxi
together. There will be a meeting point at the airport, where the cab
distribution will be arranged (the official rate for the trip from the
airport to the hotels in Vitoria-Gasteiz is 10.000 pesetas per cab; we
will do our best to obtain a reduction for the Conference).

REGISTRATION FEE:  none, as long as we are able to obtain the
economic help that Basque and Spanish institutions promised us. We
hope to be able to cover conference costs, and to organize a social
programme (welcome-reception at the Institute, trip to a nearby city
and/or song recital by one of the --to our knowledge and taste-- best
Basque composers and singers).

ACCOMMODATION
Hotel prices are listed below according to general category (roughly
corresponding to 4, 3 and 2 stars). These are reference prices for a
double room per night, breakfast included. If you are sharing the
room with some else, divide the price it into 2. If not, subtract
1.000-1.500 pesetas for individual use. All the hotels are within
walking distance of the Institute.

A. 10.000-12.000 pesetas
B.   8.000-10.000 pesetas
C.   5.000-7.000 pesetas

The following request should be directly addressed to
---------------------------------------------------------------

VIAJES ECUADOR
(ALT Biltzarra / Congreso ALT)
Plaza General Loma, 1
E-01005 Vitoria-Gasteiz
(Spain)

tel.: + 34  45  141662 / fax: 34  45  141249

I  need  accommodation  from............................
to................................
Hotel category chosen.........Single room......... Double room........
I would share a double room (give name of colleague if
necessary)...................................................................

------------------------------------------------------------------

Please complete the form below and return to:

ALT Antolamendu Taldea
Filologia eta Geografia-Historia Fakultatea
Euskal Filologia Saila
UPV/EHU
Marques de Urquijo, s/n
E-01006 Vitoria-Gasteiz
Spain

e-mail:  fvalt at vh.ehu.es
fax: + 34  45  144290
tel.: + 34  45  139811

NAME:.....................................................

INSTITUTION:..............................................

ADDRESS:..................................................

..........................................................

..........................................................

..........................................................

TEL  NO:...................................................
FAX  NO:...................................................
e-mail:.....................................................

Would you use the taxi service from Sondika aiport ?
YES.............NO..........MAYBE.........
If so and if you already know it, when is your scheduled arrival time?
.............
flight?...............................................................

Would you like to receive information on train time tables?
.............................
>>From where from are you coming to Vitoria-Gasteiz?
..................................................

--------------------------------------------

3. ALT Regional Workshops

ALT Regional Workshops

As previously announced, some of us will mee to discuss
Methodology (and perhaps other) matters  at Konstanz on June
30-July 1 (Fri-Sat).  Anyone interested in participating contact: F.
Plank, Sprachwissenschaft, Universitaet Konstanz, Postfach 5560,
D-78434 Konstanz, Germany (frans.plank at uni-konstanz.de).  The
programme will be in the next News; it's likely to include these
items:

Jan Rijkhoff (Amsterdam/Konstanz), Review of the Sampling Scene
Anna Siewierska (Lancaster), What Different Samples Tell You
About Basic Word Order, Relational Alignment, etc.
Jasmine Tragut (Graz): Typological Profile: Armenian
Wolfgang Schellinger (Konstanz): Duals and Cultures
Frans Plank (Konstanz): Duals and Languages

There is no information yet about for the workshop on regional
languages in Europe, other than that it will take place in Antwerp,
hopefully late 1995.

For mid-August 1996 a workshop is planned to take place in Graz
(Austria) on the subject of "Typology and Naturalness", in
association with a summer school on naturalness.  Information from
and suggestions to: Bernhard Hurch, Institut fuer
Sprachwissenschaft, Universitaet Graz, Mozartgasse 8, A-8010
Graz, Austria (hurch at bkfug.kfunigraz.ac.at).

Anyone else planning an ALT event of this kind?

4. Recently Published

David C. Bennett, Theodora Bynon, & B. George Hewitt (eds.)
1995: Subject, voice and ergativity. Selected essays. London: SOAS.
(With contributions by Masayoshi Shibatani, A. A. Xolodovic,
Judith M. Knott, V. P. Nedjalkov & G. A. Otaina & A. A.
Xolodovic, A. Goeksel, G. D. Wijayawardhana & Daya
Wickramasinghe & Theodora Bynon, Lone Takeuchi, Paz
Buenaventura Naylor, B. George Hewitt, Tim Farrell, Andrew
Spencer.)

Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm (ed.) 1994: Linguistic typology. Number
2 of Volume 17 of The Nordic Journal of Linguistics. Oslo:
Scandinavian University Press. (With contributions by the guest
editor, Leon Stassen, Elena S. Maslova, Konstantin I. Kazenin,
Arnfinn Muruvik Vonen, David Gil, Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald,
Kersti Boerjars.)

Frans Plank (ed) 1995: Double case. Agreement by Suffixaufnahme.
New York: Oxford University Press. (With contributions by the
editor, Gernot Wilhelm, Ilse Wegner, Winfried Boeder, Aleksandr
E. Kibrik, Ol'ga Ju. Boguslavskaja, Francisco Villar, Greville
Corbett, John Payne, Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Robert Hetzron,
Fritz Schweiger, Peter Austin, Alan Dench, Nick Evans, Anthony
Aristar, Edith Moravcsik.)

Masayoshi Shibatani & Theodora Bynon (eds) 1995: Approaches to
language typology. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (With contributions by
the editors, Paolo Ramat, Petr Sgall, William Croft, Joseph H.
Greenberg, Gilbert Lazard, Vladimir P. Nedjalkov & Viktor P.
Litvinov, Hansjakob Seiler, Naoki Fukui.)

Martin Haspelmath & Ekkehard Koenig (eds) 1995: Converbs in
cross-linguistic perspective. Berlin: MdG (EALT 13). (With
contributions by the editors, Vladimir P. Nedjalkov, Walter Bisang,
Bernd Kortmann, Daniel Weiss, Casper de Groot, Lars Johanson,
Dan I. Slobin, Mira B. Bergelson & Andrej A. Kibrik, Igor' V.
Nedjalkov, Vladimir M. Alpatov & Vera Podlesskaya, Bertil
Tikkanen.)

Claudia Gerstner 1995: Ueber Generizitaet. Muenchen: Fink

Three requests in this respect:

(1) Keep us informed of any new books of yours, or ones you have
just become aware of but we probably have not, on subjects of
ypological relevance.
(2) Ask your publisher(s) to send review copies of any typological
publications as well as of descriptive grammars to LT (at the address
of Frans Plank).
(3) Drop the editorial board of LT a line if you'd like to review
anything that ought to be reviewed in LT.

5. For Your Diary

23rd Annual UWM Linguistics Symposium

The 23rd Annual UWM Linguistics Symposium (University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee, April 18-20, 1996) will be devoted to the
topic of Functionalism and Formalism.  The organizers are seeking
papers that: (i) speak to the relationship between linguistic
functionalism and formalism, (ii) highlight the advantages or
drawbacks of some functional or formal aproach, (iii) provide
analyses of the same data from multiple perspectives, (iv) explore the
basic assumptions about language and cognition that underlie the
two approaches, (v) trace the history of one or both approaches, (vi)
offer general discussions of the formalist-functionalist dichotomy and
its implications, and/or (vii) otherwise throw light on the similarities
and differences between the two approaches and their assessment.
        Papers will be 20 minutes long, with a 10 minute discussion
period to follow. Please send 8 copies of an anonymous abstract and
a small (3x5) card containing the title of the paper and your name,
affiliation, and address. The abstract may be up to one typed page,
with figures and references allowed on a second page. Since a
camera-ready copy is needed for reproduction in the meeting
handbook if accepted, regular mail is preferred over email or fax.
        A selection of the conference papers, supplemented with some
invited  contributions, will be published by John Benjamins in a set
of volumes edited by Michael Darnell, Edith Moravcsik, Frederick
Newmeyer, and Michael Noonan.
     Send your abstract to: '96 UWM Symposium Committee,
Department of Linguistics, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee,
Milwaukee, WI 53201-0413, USA.
         ABSTRACT DEADLINE: FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 1995
  For further information:  Email: Edith Moravcsik
(edith at .csd.uwm.edu) or Michael Noonan
(noonan at .csd.uwm.edu); Phone: Noonan at (414) 220-4539,
Moravcsik at (414) 229-6794, or leave messages at (414) 229-4285;
Fax: (414) 229-6258;  Snailmail:  write to Noonan or Moravcsik at
the postal address above.

6. The Good Grammar Guide

Doing typology you are at the mercy of the descriptive grammarian,
and lacking expertise in virtually all of the languages that you would
dearly love to have in your carefully chosen sample, how on earth
are you to judge whether you are really getting value for money
when you have (courtesy of Interlibrary Loan) finally managed to get
your hands on what seems to be the only published grammar of, say,
Taensa, and are told, in that order (laid down in the LSD
regulations), that the Taensans, whose definite article is
homonymous with the numeral 'one' and whose quattral is limited to
nouns denoting the extremities of quadrupeds and centipedes
(innumeracy is rife in the community!), are avid pro-droppers, strict
non-configurationalists, open vowel-harmonists, mixed
ergative-accusative-aligners, level tonogeneticists, incorporated
polysynthesizers, compulsive metathesizers with an almost
unsavoury infixing preference, and utterly confused markers (forever
unable to sort out what are the heads and what the dependents)--all
of which would in fact tie in nicely with your most cherished
implications of basic VOS, but sadly word order is something your
grammarian has entirely missed out on (All grammars leak, even
Panini's!), and she hasn't got round to collecting texts either for you
to form your own opinion on this matter, and on others hidden in
footnotes that you have not cared to read because they are printed
as endnotes.
        You can of course take a couple of weeks off from
typologizing and do your own fieldwork on Taensa and the
threescore other languages where you have a vague feeling that your
grammars might have left you in the lurch.
        If pressed for time, you might also send out an SOS on the
Internet, and you will sure enough be flooded with instant replies
from kindly souls one half of whom couldn'be more confident that
Taensa is indeed basically VOS while the other, equally
well-informed half, including someone who claims to have only
recently been divorced from a native speaker, seem to remember it
as rigidly SOV.
        If you incline to pitch your typological hopes on what you and
everybody else can read up on in published grammars rather than on
yourself in the field or on others on the net, what you want to have,
in short, is expert advice on whether there are reliable,
comprehensive, and user-friendly grammars for the languages over
which you intend to generalize.
        Perhaps ALT can be of some assistance here.
        ALT News proposes to compile a Good Grammar Guide, but
it needs your cooperation to be able to provide this service.
        If you are confident that you know one or more languages well
enough to be able to judge the quality of published descriptions,
drop ALT News a line with your recommendations which we will
collect and, over the years, pass on to the typological public in future
News.
        For an enterprise of a similar kind, though one limited to
Greater Europe, we draw your attention to Section 1.1 of the
Committee on Computation and Standardization's EUROTYP
Guidelines of 1993, probably to be reproduced in the first of the
forthcoming volumes of results of the European Science
Foundation's Programme in Language Typology.
        ALT News also welcomes opinions on possible disadvantages
and even dangers of establishing such a canon in a field such as ours.
        Address for Good Grammar Guide correspondence: F. Plank,
Sprachwissenschaft, Universitaet Konstanz, Postfach 5560, D-78434
Konstanz, Germany; frans.plank at uni-konstanz.de.

FP & JvdA