[Corpora-List] correction to Call for papers - Converging and diverging evidence: corpora and other (cognitive) phenomena? - Proposal for a workshop at the Corpus Linguistics Conference 2009

Mon Oct 13 11:59:50 UTC 2008

*the year should be *2009*, of course, not 2008. apologies for the 
oversight and thanks to Fanny Meunier for noticing so quickly*

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

Dagmar Divjak (University of Sheffield) and Stefan Th. Gries (UCSB).

Proposal for a theme session at the Corpus Linguistics Conference 2009,
Liverpool, 20-23 July 2009
[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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