[Corpora-List] Call for papers - Converging and diverging evidence: corpora and other (cognitive) phenomena? - Proposal for a workshop at the Corpus Linguistics Conference 2008

[Dagmar S Divjak]

Converging and diverging evidence: corpora and other (cognitive) phenomena?

Proposal for a theme session at the Corpus Linguistics Conference 2008, 
Liverpool, 20-23 July 2008
[http://www.liv.ac.uk/english/CL2009/]


Over the last decade, it has become increasingly popular for (cognitive) 
linguists who believe that language emerges from use to turn to corpora 
as a source of authentic usage data (for an overview, see Gries & 
Stefanowitsch 2006). Recently, a trend has emerged to supplement such 
corpus analyses with experimental data that presumably reflect aspects 
of cognitive representation and/or processing (more) directly. If 
converging evidence is obtained, the cognitive claims made on the basis 
of corpus data are supported (Gries et al. 2005, to appear; Grondelaers 
& Speelman 2007; Divjak & Gries 2008; Dąbrowska in press) and the status 
of corpora a legitimate means to explore cognition is strengthened. Yet, 
recently, diverging evidence has been made available, too: frequency 
data collected from corpora sometimes make predictions that conflict 
with those made by experimental data (cf. Arppe&Järvikivi 2007, McGee to 
appear, Nordquist 2006, to appear) or do not quite as reliably 
approximate theoretical concepts from cognitive linguistics such as 
prototypicality and entrenchment as one would have hoped (cf. Gilquin 
2006; Divjak to appear; Gries to appear; Wiechmann to appear). This 
crushes hopes that the linguistic properties of texts produced by 
speakers can reveal the way linguistic knowledge is represented in their 
heads.

In this workshop, we want to focus on the question to what degree 
corpora can (or should) be up to the task of predicting cognitive 
phenomena. Despite the importance attributed to frequency in 
contemporary linguistics, the relationship between frequencies of 
occurrence in texts on the one hand, and status or structure in 
cognition as reflected in experiments on the other hand has not been 
studied in great detail, and hence remains poorly understood. It is the 
aim of this workshop to explore the relationship between certain aspects 
of language and their representation in cognition as mediated by 
frequency counts in both text and experiment. Do certain types of 
experimental data fit certain types of corpus data better than they fit 
others? Which established corpus-derived statistics correlate best with 
experimental results? Or should corpus data be analyzed radically 
differently, i.e. by means of advanced multifactorial techniques, in 
order to make them reveal the wealth of cognitive information they 
(might) contain?

For this workshop we invite papers that report on converging as well as 
diverging evidence between corpus data and experimental data and 
interpret the implications of this from a cognitive-linguistic or 
psycholinguistic perspective. Contributions from all domains (e.g., 
language acquisition, processing, or representation) and linguistic 
subdisciplines (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) 
will be considered.


Submission Procedure

Please submit:
what: your 500-word abstract (1'' margins, Times New Roman, size 12 
font) as .odt, .rtf, or .doc file
when: by 1 December 2008
to whom: <d.divjak at sheffield.ac.uk> and <stgries at linguistics.ucsb.edu>
how: in an email with the subject heading "Corpora 2009 theme session"

Please include:
- title of paper
- name(s) of author(s)
- affiliation(s)
- contact e-mail address(es)

Contact person: Dagmar S. Divjak d.divjak at sheffield.ac.uk


Selected references

Arppe, A. & J. Järvikivi. 2007. Every method counts - Combining 
corpus-based and experimental evidence in the study of synonymy. Corpus 
Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 3(2):131-59.
Divjak, D.S. to appear. On (in)frequency and (un)acceptability. In: B. 
Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (ed.). Corpus linguistics, computer tools and 
applications - state of the art. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, p. 1-21.
Dąbrowska, E. (in press). Words as constructions. In: V. Evans & S. 
Pourcel (eds.). New directions in cognitive linguistics. Amsterdam, 
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Divjak, D.S. & St.Th. Gries. 2008. Clusters in the Mind? Converging 
evidence from near-synonmymy in Russian. The Mental Lexicon 3(2):188-213.
Gilquin, G. 2006. The place of prototypicality in corpus linguistics. 
In: St.Th. Gries & A. Stefanowitsch (eds.), p. 159-91.
Gries, St.Th. to appear. Dispersions and adjusted frequencies in 
corpora: further explorations.
Gries, St.Th., B. Hampe, & D. Schönefeld. 2005. Converging evidence: 
bringing together experimental and corpus data on the association of 
verbs and constructions. Cognitive Linguistics 16(4):635-76.
Gries, St.Th. & A. Stefanowitsch (eds.). 2006. Corpora in cognitive 
linguistics: corpus-based approaches to syntax and lexis. Berlin, New 
York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Grondelaers S. & D. Speelman. 2007. A variationist account of 
constituent ordering in presentative sentences in Belgian Dutch. Corpus 
Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 3(2):161-93.
Hoffmann, T. 2006. Corpora and introspection as corroborating evidence: 
the case of preposition placement in English relative clauses. Corpus 
Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 2(2):165-95.
McGee, I. to appear. Adjective-noun collocations in elicited and corpus 
data: similarities: differences and the whys and wherefores. Corpus 
Linguistics and Linguistic Theory.
Nordquist, D. 2004. Comparing elicited data and corpora. In: M. Achard & 
S. Kemmer (eds.). Language, culture, and mind. Stanford, CA: CSLI 
Publications, p. 211-23.
Nordquist, D. to appear. Investigating elicited data from a usage-based 
perspective. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory.
Wiechmann, D. to appear. On the computation of collostruction strength. 
Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory.
Wulff, S. to appear. Converging evidence from corpus and experimental 
data to capture idiomaticity. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory.



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