ALT News No. 34

Sun Mar 28 13:51:24 UTC 2004

ALT News No.34

March 2004

1. Message from the New President

2. The New Officers

3. ALT VI

4. ALT VII

5. Recently Published

6. Membership fees

1. Message from the New President

As recently elected president, I would like to use this first newsletter
during my term of office to address the growing band of typologists
around the world who belong to ALT.

First, I would like to express my thanks to those who nominated me. In
my personal view this honour is decades premature, given the many
eminent typologists in our ranks who deserve it far more than I do, but
I will meet the challenges it poses with pride, energy and excitement.
While stuck between planes at LA airport last month I read through the
LT archive of newsletters, working backwards to the first numbers just
over a decade ago, and couldn't help being struck at the growing size,
momentum and confidence of our organization, with membership numbers
swelling from 195 at the end of 1994 to close to 800 today. Originally a
predominantly Europe-based organization, it is beginning to have members
from every region of the world, if not yet  from every country or - more
idealistically - from every language community. That same period has
seen the development, under Frans Plank's genial and erudite leadership,
of a first-rate journal, Linguistic Typology, one of the few journals in
our field that you can't wait to read from cover to cover. For these and
many other achievements in ALT's first decade there are many people to
thank, including our indefatigable secretary Johan van der Auwera, the
two past presidents, Bernard Comrie and Marianne Mithun, the past
members of the executive committee and the LT editorial board,
organizers of the previous biennial ALT conferences, Web manager Peter
Kahrel, our publishing allies at Mouton de Gruyter for their unstinting
nourishment of a new journal, and many others.

I see two main challenges for ALT in the coming years.

Firstly, I don't think typology yet lives up to its potential to be a
unifying force in the broader field of linguistics, riven as linguistics
is by school-formation and ever-increasing disciplinary fragmentation.
Typology is the natural link between those interested in various forms
of theory, on the one hand (whether formal, or cognitive), and those
linguists whose interests lie in the description and documentation of
the world's five or six thousand, mostly little-known languages. In his
recent obituary note for Joseph Greenberg in the 2002 issue of LT
(6.1:25), Claude Hagège quoted Louis Hjelmslev: "Only through typology
does linguistics rise to quite general points of view and become a
science", and I think this is a fair assessment. Formalized theories
offer us the possibility of rigorous model-building in a way that tests
the untold interactions we find in language. But any attempt they make
to formulate cross-linguistically valid claims - which lie at the heart
of the field's appeal as we search for what is universal and what is
contingent and variable in human languages -  must be tested within
typology. Yet though typologists themselves are well aware of this
special role we have in testing universalizing claims, our field
generally hides its light under a bushel when it comes to dealing either
with our generativist colleagues, or more generally with other related
disciplines in the cognitive sciences. Views about the entrenchment of
some 'Universal Grammar' in the human mind are hard for most typologists
to entertain, in the light of their exposure to linguistic diversity -
or after spending time browsing the Konstanz Universals Archive
(http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/proj/sprachbau.htm). It is important
that we take the hard-won knowledge of our field into the broader arena
and engage more actively with formally-based approaches, and in
particular the generative tradition.

Secondly, looking in the other direction, typologists also need to
engage more with descriptive linguists working on particular languages
or language families. This is where my own intellectual roots lie: I was
led into typology by the challenges of discerning the architectural
lines of the Australian Aboriginal languages I have worked on, usually
with vanishingly little prior documentation. When I began work on
Kayardild in 1982, on Mornington Island in remote north-west Queensland,
I had with me a clutch of photocopied chapters from Tim Shopen's epocal
three-volume 1985 publication Language Typology and Syntactic
Description. They helped me immeasurably as I tried to work out what
might be going on with complementation, modality and all the other
wondrous dimensions of Kayardild grammar, and in giving me some sense of
what was reasonably normal in the language and what was completely way out.

Typologists, among the few inhabitants of this earth to avidly read
obscure grammars, thus have a crucial role to play in dialogue with the
many descriptive linguists engaged with fragile, little-known languages
around the world. We are the subfield concerned with developing a body
of analytically compatible concepts valid across all the world's
languages, and with integrating the vast library of grammatical
descriptions in a way that renders them at least broadly compatible, if
not rigidly standardized. Describing each language entirely on its own
terms is a noble and galvanizing task, but unless grammarians orient
their findings to what typologists know about the world's other
languages, their grammars can all too easily become obscure, crabbed and
solipsistic, or at best half-veiled in the idiosyncrasies of specific
areal or language-family-specific tradtions.
At the same time, thanks to the internet and a proliferation of new
organizations and protocols, terminological standardization is in the
air, and typologists with their interest in cross-linguistic comparison
have an important role to play in debating the best standards to use,
whether this concerns the idiosyncratic and unsung art of glossing
(check out the Leipzig glossing rules at
http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/files/morpheme.html) or the use of
abbreviations for language names (see the new Ethnologue Three-letter
Language name codes on
http://www.ethnologue.com/language_code_index.asp). Though there will
always be room in typology and language description for the completely
new and unanticipated category, we will be able to spot the gold in the
sand much more easily if we are not distracted by dozens of competing
notational conventions.

These are some of the intellectual challenges that flow from our
potentially central and integrative role in the field of linguistics. Of
course there are many others, dealing with new questions and theoretical
currents within typology itself, but since this debate is already
happening so vigorously among typologists I will not say more about it here.

Organizationally, we still lie far below our potential in terms of being
a truly significant international organization. Though membership
numbers are growing steadily, bringing with it the possibility of
expanding the scope and quality of our activities, there are still many
practising linguists around the world, doing or engaging with typology
in some guise, but who are not members of our organization. The most
decisive factor in expanding our organization further is the
intellectual one of deep, interesting and far-reaching debate. And the
two main venues where this is seen lie in our journal and in our
biennial conferences. In each case, the challenge is simple: to keep
making the journal one that most linguists will feel uninformed if they
haven't read, and that no self-respecting university library would be
without, and to make our conferences the sort of exciting events that
cash- and time-starved linguists will prefer to go to than to other
alternative conferences.

With this issue of our newsletter we are announcing the venue of our
next ALT conference, to be held in Padang, Indonesia in July, 2005, with
an organizing committee headed by David Gil and Uri Tadmor, and a local
committee made up of Bambang Kaswanti Purwo and Soenjono Dardjowidjojo
(Universitas Atja Jaya, Jakarta) and Yusrita Yanti (Universitas Bung
Hatta, Padang). This will take our conferences to Asia for the first
time - indeed, it is the first time we are holding it outside Europe or
North America - and we hope thereby to quicken interest in typology
among linguists of the broad Asian region, while at the same time
offering our colleagues from elsewhere in the world an enticing venue in
the country which, after Papua New Guinea, contains the second highest
number of languages in the world. Over the coming months the conference
organizing committee will be working out the broad lines of how the
conference will be run. Various questions have already come up - e.g.
should we depart from tradition and introduce one or two plenary
sessions, and are there any special workshops we should be trying to
mount, or particular areas of typology that we have neglected and should
be cultivating at the conference? We welcome suggestions from all our
members on new elements worth bringing into the next conference - just
sent them to Johan van der Auwera or myself and we will forward them to
the organizing committee's discussion network. In the meantime chalk
July 21-25th into your 2005 agenda, and I look forward to meeting many
of you there.

2. The New Officers

As of January 1 2004, ALT has the following officers:

President: Nick Evans (Melbourne)

Secretary-Treasurer: Johan van der Auwera (Antwerp)

Editor in chief Linguistic Typology: Frans Plank (Konstanz)

Executive Committee: Östen Dahl (Stockholm), William Foley (Sydney),
Zygmunt Frayzyngier (Boulder), Marianne Mithun (Santa Barbara), Doris
Payne (Eugene), Vera Podlesskaya (Moscow), Nick Evans (President), Frans
Plank (Editor in chief LT), Johan van der Auwera (Secretary-Treasurer)

Editorial Board: Peter Bakker (Århus), Hilary Chappell (Bundoora), Alice
Harris (Nashville), Larry Hyman (Berkeley), Marianne Mithun (Santa
Barbara), Johanna Nichols (Berkeley), Masayoshi Shibatani (Kobe), Dan
Slobin (Berkeley), Nick Evans (President), Frans Plank (Editor in chief LT)

News Men: President, Secretary-Treasurer, Editor in chief LT

Net/web man: Peter Kahrel (Lancaster)

3. ALT VI

First Announcement

Location:

Padang, West Sumatra, Indonesia

Date:

21-25 July 2005

Host Institutions:

Jakarta Field Station, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology, Leipzig

PKBB, Universitas Atma Jaya, Jakarta

Faculty of Letters, Universitas Bung Hatta, Padang

Venue:

Bumi Minang Hotel

Outline of Programme:

The conference will begin at midday on the 21st, and end at midday on
the 25th.  The afternoon of the 21st and the morning of the 22nd will be
devoted to a workshop on the languages of Sumatra; the remainder of the
time to the main ALT meeting.  The afternoon of the 25th and all of the
26th will be devoted to cultural events and excursions.

Travel:

The most straightforward way to get to Padang is by plane via Jakarta,
which is served by most major European and East Asian airlines.  From
Jakarta to Padang there are about a dozen daily flights; flying time is
a little over one hour, and the round-trip fare is under 80 Euros.
Alternatively, one can fly to Padang directly from Singapore or Kuala
Lumpur, though these flights are considerably less frequent.

Accommodation:

The conference venue, the four-star Bumi Minang hotel, is offering
special rates which begin at around 40 Euros for a single room,
including breakfast, net.  In addition, there is a wide range of cheaper
accommodation available within easy walking distance.

Adjacent Events in Padang:

On 18-21 July (ending at midday), the Linguistic Association of
Indonesia will hold its triennial meeting.  And 27-29 July, the 9th
annual ISMIL (International Symposium on Malay/Indonesian Linguistics)
will take place.

Some Additional Reasons to Come to Padang:

A beachside promenade within 5 minutes walk from the hotel; volcanic
lakes fringed by rice paddies and coconut palms just an hour's drive
away; a unique matriarchal society with a fascinating culture; one of
the world's best cuisines; a country with possibly 800 languages; and a
chance to support the development of linguistics and linguistic typology
in Indonesia and Southeast Asia.

Website:

The ALT VI website can be accessed at http://www.eva.mpg.de/~gil/alt/.
At present it contains skeletal information; however, within the next
few weeks, detailed information on travel, accommodation, and other
practical matters will be posted.

Inquiries:

David Gil

email:  gil at eva.mpg.de

phone (Germany): 49-341-3550310

phone (Indonesia): 62-21-5741842

4. ALT VII

We already have an offer for hosting the ALT VII Conference from the
Paris Fédération "Typologie et universaux linguistiques"
(http://www.typologie.cnrs.fr) under the directorship of Stéphane Robert
(robert at vjf.cnrs.fr). As ALT can only gain by having the calendar fixed
for a full four year period, the Executive Committee would like to
settle this matter in the near future. Could any member that would also
have an offer for the 2007 ALT VII Conference, please contact the
President or the Secretary-Treasurer at their earliest convenience. The
deadline for full proposals will be June 1, 2004.

5. Recently Published

And feel free to add whatever YOU think is "typological" or "of
typological relevance".  Through this listing, LT (this is how ALT's
journal is commonly abbreviated) solicits offers to review books --
those listed below (or in previous ALT News) or whichever you've added.
In addition, LT directly commissions book reviews.  For purposes of book
reviewing in LT, what matters is that REVIEWS are done from a
distinctively typological angle, whatever angles the books reviewed are
done from.  Reviewers so intentioned please get in touch with me,
frans.plank at uni-konstanz.de <mailto:frans.plank at uni-konstanz.de> [Since
so many of our listings or your addenda turn out never ever to get
reviewed in LT, short, or indeed very short, book notices are being
supplied for some of them.  This is not to preclude proper reviews in LT.]

Drop me a line with bibliographical particulars if you want to make sure
your own relevant publications will be included in the next listing.
And remind your publisher to send a review copy to: LINGUISTIC TYPOLOGY,
Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Konstanz, D-78457 Konstanz, Germany.

GRAMMAR WATCH will be back in one of the next ALT News.  But do feel
free to offer to review grammars for LT (and therefore from a
distinctively typological angle) at any time.

Alexiadou, Artemis (ed.) (2003). Theoretical Approaches to Universals.
Amsterdam: Benjamins. [See below for other approaches.]

Arkan, I Wayan (2003). Balinese Morphosyntax: A Lexical-Functional
Approach. (Pacific Linguistics, 547.) Canberra: Australian National
University.

Bhat, D. N. S. (2003). Pronouns. (OSTLT.) Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Billiez, Jacqueline (ed.) (2003). Contacts de langues: Modèles, typologies

interventions. Paris: L'Harmattan.

Boeder, Winfried (ed.) (2003). Kaukasische Sprachprobleme: Beiträge zu
den Kaukasistentagungen in Oldenburg 1995-2001. (Caucasica
Oldenburgensia, 1.) Oldenburg: Bibliotheks- und Informationssystem der
Universität Oldenburg. [From Georgian verbs of perception to Georgian
mountain dialects, with language emphases on, well, Georgian, including
its Khevsur and Ferejdan dialects, but also Svan, Mingrelian and Laz,
and, to transcend Kartvel, a little Nakh-Daghestanian. Friends of
clusivity will be glad to have the relevant chapter of Oniani's Svan
grammar translated, if only into German, and even gladder to get an
editorial note into the bargain, which is longer than the paper and
gives a state of the art on INCL/EXCL in Kartvel.]

Burridge, Kate (2004). Blooming English. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. ["English is the most creative, changeable and imaginative of
languages." Runners up were Pennsylvania Dutch and Pictish.  Eskimo was
bottom of the table, not having enough words for snow.  Previously
published in Australia and New Zealand by ABC Books.]

Cameron, Deborah & Don Kulick (2003). Language and Sexuality. Same
publisher. [Ch. 3: What has gender got to do with sex?]

Childs, G. Tucker (2003). An Introduction to African Languages.
Amsterdam: Benjamins. [Ch. 6: Historical and typological issues]

Dalby, Andrew (2003). Language in Danger: The Loss of Linguistic
Diversity and the Threat to our Future. New York: Columbia University Press.

Dufter, Andreas (2003). Typen sprachrhythmischer Konturbildung.
Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Fiorentino, Giuliana (ed.) (2003). Romance Objects: Transitivity in
Romance Languages. (EALT, 27.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Frajzyngier, Zygmunt & Erin Shay (2003). Explaining Language Structure
through Systems Interaction. (TSL, 55.) Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Ido, Shinji (2003). Agglutinative Information: A Study of Turkish
Incomplete Sentences. (Turcologica, 55.) Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
[Actually, it's on Turkish AND Uzbek, Japanese, (Bukharan) Tajik.]

Kortmann, Bernd (ed.) (2004). Dialectology Meets Typology: Dialect
Grammar from a Cross-linguistic Perspective. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
[The dialects are mostly Germanic, complemented by a little variation
from Baltic-Slavic, Greek, and Romani -- what you call a "broad range"
in blurb speech. "What can typologists learn from the study of
non-standard varieties?" Good question.]

Luraghi, Silvia (2003). On the Meaning of Prepositions and Cases: The
Expression of Semantic Roles in Ancient Greek. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Mathiesson, Johanna (2003). Dependent-Head Synthesis in Nivkh: A
Contribution to a Typology of Polysynthesis. (TSL, 57.) Amsterdam:
Benjamins. [Nivkh means 'person'.  See Siewierska 2004.]

Matras, Yaron & Peter Bakker (eds.) (2003). The Mixed Language Debate:
Theoretical and Empirical Advances. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Merle, Jean-Marie (ed.) (2003). Le sujet. (Bibliotheque de faits de
langues.) Gap: Ophrys.

Mous, Maarten (2003). The Making of a Mixed Language: The Case of
Ma'a/Mbugu. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Nariyama, Shigeko (2003). Ellipsis and Reference Tracking in Japanese.
Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Nelson, Diane & Satu Manninen (eds.) (2003). Generative Approaches to
Finnic and Saami Linguistics. Stanford, CA: CSLI.

Oresnik, Janez (2004). Naturalness in (Morpho)Syntax: English Examples.
(Slovenska akademija znanosti in umetnosti, Dela, 61.) Ljubljana:
Slovenska akademija znanosti in umetnosti.

Ormelius, Daniel (2003). Konzeptuelle Struktur und materielle
Manifestation: Nominale Part-Whole-Konstruktionen aus einer
typologischen Perspektive. (Lunder germanistische Forschungen, 65.)
Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. [On partitive and pseudo-partitive
constructions, especially in German, with comparisons to Swedish and
English, and, less thoroughly, Latin, Italian, Catalan, French, Czech,
Armenian, Basque, Finnish, Hungarian, (Mandarin) Chinese.]

Premper, Waldfried (ed.) (2004). Dimensionen und Kontinua: Beiträge zu
Hansjakob Seilers Universalienforschung. (Diversitas Linguarum, 4.)
Bochum: Universitätsverlag Dr. N. Brockmeyer.

Restle, David (2003). Silbenschnitt - Quantität - Kopplung: Zur
Geschichte, Charakterisierung und Typologie der Anschlußprosodie.
München: Fink.

Schaffar, Wolfram (2003). Die Informationsstruktur der japanischen
Sprache: Eine Analyse von Nominalisierungen, Fokuspartikeln und
Kakari-Musubi-Konstruktionen im modernen Japanischen, klassischen
Japanischen und in der Sprache von Ryûkyû. Münster: Lit.

Siewierska, Anna (2004). Person. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Werner, Heinrich (2004). Zur jenissejisch-indianischen Urverwandtschaft.
Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Wolff, Heinrich E. (ed.) (2003). Topics in Chadic Linguistics. Köln: Köppe.

Zhang, Jie (2002). The effects of duration and sonority on contour tone
distribution: A typological survey and formal analysis. (Outstanding
Dissertations in Linguistics.) London: Routledge.

6. Membership fees

It has become a routine to compare the membership lists kept on the web
by Peter Kahrel with the one kept by Mouton de Gruyter. Ideally, there
should not be much of a discrepancy, but the reality has proved to be
different. Some of the discrepancy is due to members that fail to meet
their financial obligations. Members that may be in trouble will have
received a reminder from Mouton de Gruyter in the middle of March and
have been asked to contact the Mouton de Gruyter office. Part of the
problem may be that members that pay with a credit card were asked in a
letter from Mouton to supply the card verification code of their credit
card. Apparently, not all members took action - or did not, perhaps,
receive this message. We have also added a note called 'Payment and
cancellation details' on the ALT web page.

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-

Nick Evans[President]

Linguistics

University of Melbourne                tel +61 3 8344 8988

Parkville Victoria                     fax +61 3 8344 8990

Australia

E-mail:                 n.evans at linguistics.unimelb.edu.au

Frans Plank [Editor-in-chief, Linguistic Typology]

Sprachwissenschaft

Universität Konstanz

D-78457 Konstanz                   tel + 49 7531 88 26 56

Germany                            fax + 49 7531 88 27 41

E-mail:                       frans.plank at uni-konstanz.de

Johan van der Auwera [Secretary-Treasurer]

Linguistiek

Universiteit Antwerpen

B-2610 Antwerpen                     tel + 32 3 820 27 76

Belgium                              fax + 32 3 820 27 62

E-mail:                       johan.vanderauwera at ua.ac.be

On the WEB:  http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fss/organisations/alt/

Webmaster : Peter Kahrel         p.kahrel at lancaster.ac.uk

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