Corpora: CfP: Workshop on 'Explaining Productivity'

[Anke Lüdeling]

Workshop "Explaining Productivity"  - CALL FOR PAPERS
Deadline 9 August, 2002


Abstracts are invited for papers to be presented at the Workshop
"Explaining Productivity", taking place at the 25th Annual
Meeting of the German Society for Linguistics (DGfS)in Munich
(February 26 - 28, 2003)

Workshop Organizer: Peter Bosch, Inst. of Cognitive Science,
University of Osnabrueck

One of the essential features of human language is its productivity:
the built-in option for the construction of new forms - words,
phrases, sentences, texts - derived on the basis of simple and complex
forms already known, and new uses, functions, or meanings for these
forms in new contexts.

Classic Generative Grammar has gone a long way explaining the
productivity of I-language (commonly under the name of "creativity")
by means of recursion of categorial rules, and Formal Semantics -
guided by the postulate of compositionality - has been equally
successful on the semantic side. In combination with a theory of
genetically determined Universal Grammar this model leaves however
little room for the role of the individual's linguistic experience and
for E-language.

Over the past decade, and usually independently, approaches in
Psycholinguistics, Neurolinguistics, Neuroinformatics, Computational
Linguistics, Language Technology as well as in theoretically less
committed approaches in descriptive linguistics, have worked on
complementary models for the explanation of productivity that put less
weight on categorial rules and instead focus on patterns of linguistic
experience, quantitative data, and mechanisms for projecting
linguistic knowledge to new contexts and situations that are inspired
by analogy.

There has been only little discussion across the boundaries of the
approaches just sketched, and the discussion that there has been is
limited to phenomena of Phonology, Morphology, and Syntax.  The
Workshop is interested in the semantic side of productivity - not in
the sense of excluding matters of phonological, morphological and
syntactic productivity, but in the sense of looking at their semantic
aspects as well as at contextual and situational parameters.

Topic areas and methodology for the Workshop:

Indexicality, compositionality, semantics of word formation and
derivation, semantics for "constructions", discourse semantics,
language contact, language development, historical linguistics, The
methodology of the workshop is explicitly interdisciplinary and
presentations from Psycholinguistics, Neurolinguistics, Computational
Linguistics, Neuroinformatics, are explicitly invited.

Papers offered for presentation should be explicitly addressed at the
question of how particular forms of semantic productivity are to be
explained.

The presentation may be in English or German, although presentation in
English is encouraged. Time for presentation will be 30 minutes
(including discussion). A maximum of 15 papers can be accepted for the
Workshop. Intending participants are warned that the regulations of
DGfS explicitly exclude presentations by the same person at more than
one of the workshops at the DGfS conference.

Abstracts must not exceed one page A4 (12-point font, 2.5 cm margins),
but references and materials may be attached on separate sheets (which
will not be printed in DGfS's conference brochure but only in the
workshop materials) and must be submitted as either ASCII or RTF
documents (no PS or PDF because they may have to be reformatted).

DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS:  9 August, 2002
NOTIFICATION OF ACCEPTANCE: 9 September, 2002

Please send your abstract by email to pbosch at uos.de, Peter Bosch,
Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrueck,
Kolpingstr. 7, 49069 Osnabrueck, Germany, fon: (+49 541) 969 6224,