ICHL XIX Nijmegen 2009: call for papers

Tue Jul 22 14:58:20 UTC 2008

The XIXth International Conference on Historical Linguistics

10-15 August 2009

Radboud University Nijmegen, Centre for Language Studies

Invited speakers confirmed so far

Russell Gray (Auckland, New Zealand)

Giuseppe Longobardi (Trieste)

Shana Poplack (Ottawa)

John Whitman (Cornell)

Charles Yang (Penn)

First circular and call for papers

Abstracts are invited  for papers of 30 minutes including discussion. Please
send in  an abstract of no more than 300 words, including your most
important literature references. The deadline for abstracts is 10 January
2009. The conference will host a number of workshops and thematic sessions,
which are listed below. Abstracts for these sessions are submitted, like
those for the general sessions, to a  separate abstract submission website
(under construction). More details on this will be posted in the second
circular shortly after the summer.

The second circular will also contain more detailed about registration and
accommodation.

Note the conference e-mail address: ICHL19 at let.ru.nl. The website with more
information will be up in the course of August.

Local committee: Ans van Kemenade, with Griet Coupé, Marion Elenbaas, Nynke
de Haas, Haike Jacobs, Bettelou Los, Margit Rem and Angela Terrill

Workshops include

The origin of non-canonical subject marking in Indo-European 

Convener: Jóhanna Barðdal (Bergen)  E-mail: johanna.barddal at uib.no

Several of the Modern Indo-European languages that have maintained
morphological case exhibit structures where the subject(-like) argument is
not canonically case marked. These are found amongst the Modern Germanic
languages, Modern Russian, the Modern Baltic languages and the Modern
Indo-Aryan languages, to mention some. It is traditionally assumed in the
literature that these have developed from objects to subjects (see, for
instance, Hewson and Bubenik 2006), hence the case marking. Recently,
however, it has been argued for Germanic that oblique subjects in the modern
languages were syntactic subjects already in Old Germanic (Eythórsson and
Barðdal 2005). This raises the question whether these non-canonically
case-marked subject(-like) arguments were objects in Proto-Germanic or
Proto-Indo-European, or whether they may have been syntactic subjects all
along, given an assumption of the alignment system in Proto-Indo-European
being a Fluid-S system (cf. Barðdal and Eythórsson 2008). It is, moreover,
possible that the case marking patterns of different predicate types have
different origins in Indo-European. The aim of this workshop is therefore to
gather researchers who work on case marking in Indo-European, and case
marking in general, to a forum where the more general topic of the origin of
this non-canonical case marking can be discussed. By doing that, we hope to
shed light on this important issue within case marking and alignment,
historical linguistics, and Indo-European studies.

So just what IS sound change anyway? Definitional, conceptual, and empirical
issues in the study of change in sound.

Convener: Brian Joseph (Ohio State). E-mail: Bjoseph at ling.ohio-state.edu

The study of sound change is in many ways the foundation upon which modern
(post-18th century) historical linguistics has been built, yet much about it
still remains unaccounted for.  Even  

something as basic as what we mean by the term "sound change"---  i.e., any
change in the realization of the sounds of a word, only phonetically driven
change in sounds, only systemic changes in sound patterns, only regular (in
the Neogrammarian sense) change in sounds, or what? --- is not agreed upon
by all historical linguists, and the respective roles of social factors as
opposed to phonological

(systemic) factors as opposed to phonetic (articulatory and acoustic)
factors in sound change are yet to be fully sorted out.  The framing issues
for this day-long workshop are how sound change is to be defined, how sound
change achieves regularity (if it ever does), how is sound change to be
separated out from other changes that have similar effects, whether
innovation is to be distinguished from spread in studying and understanding
sound change, and what is at stake in characterizing sound change in a
precise way.  

Spatial dynamics of language change

Conveners: Roeland van Hout (Nijmegen) and Gertjan Postma
(Meertensinstituut)

E-mail: Gertjanpostma at mac.com

This workshop will focus on the way we can incorporate space in our models
of language variation and change and how we can shift from static to dynamic
interpretations of spatial relationships. A first step is building in the
space factor in quantitative models of language variation. This is done in
gravity models as applied by Trudgill (1974) in which space is incorporated
as a distance factor. Another example is Hard (1972) who used computer
simulations for testing diffusion processes. Nerbonne & Heeringa (2001) and
Spruijt (2008) map dialect distances to colours on the basis of
multidimensional scaling. In language typology we see new methods of
visualizing linguistic distances (clustering, neighbourhood analysis;
Longobardi & Guardiano (2005), Dunn et al. (2005), McMahon & McMahon 2003),
and the question arises how we can relate it to geography. Is there a way to
infer from the space-like dynamics of a change to the structural properties
involved, similar to what Kroch established for the time dimension? Do
related isoglosses spread with similar speed and/or steepness? For instance,
in work dealing with the diphtongization isogloss in Flanders, Taeldeman
(2001) ties the smoothness/ sharpness of a dialect boundary to its
socio-temporal dynamics: only isoglosses that represent active phonetic
shifts proceed smoothly, while in subsequent stages of lexical diffusion,
the isogloss exhibits a sharper edge. One of the challenges of this workshop
is to explore how to tie spatial dynamics to structural properties, parallel
to what the Constant Rate Hypothesis captures in time-dimension (tying
properties of the temporal dynamics to relations in the parameter settings
of the varieties involved).

Kinship terminologies:change and reconstruction

Conveners: Patrick McConvell (Australian National University) and Jeff Marck
(Cairo)

E-mail:  <mailto:Patrick.mcconvell at anu.edu.au> Patrick.mcconvell at anu.edu.au

Study of kinship terminologies and systems has been one of the major joint
endeavours of comparative linguistics and the social sciences, especially
anthropology. Reconstruction of prehistoric systems has shed light on the
form of the societies of proto-language speakers and the changes leading to
present-day societies. In turn the systematic study of the typology of, and
constraints on, kinship systems in anthropology has assisted linguists in
their reconstruction work. While kinship,  particularly diachronic kinship,
has become unfashionable in anthropology in the last 20-30 years, it is now
experiencing a renaissance, with new publications appearing often drawing on
linguistic evidence. There is also significant interest in history in
documented kinship changes in Europe and elsewhere, and this provides a more
detailed source about transitions in meanings and their motivations which
can aid in reconstruction. We are calling for papers on examples of
reconstruction of proto-terminologies in families and sub-groups; change in
morphology, semantics and usage, and borrowing of terms, whether based on
prehistoric reconstructions or written sources. Papers on theoretical and
methodological issues, especially addressing the interdisciplinary nature of
this field, are also welcome.

Language and Migration

Convener: Rob Howell (Madison) E-mail: rbhowell at wisc.edu

Historical linguists have long recognized that demographic shifts can play a
major role in language change.  Nonetheless, the effects of migration and
the resultant language and or dialect contact are poorly understood.
Despite a surge in research on language contact, dialect contact and
koineisation over the past three decades, the wide range of linguistic
outcomes of migration-induced language- and dialect-contact situations
implies that facile approaches to the issue will prove inadequate. 

This workshop aims to tackle the thorny issues surrounding the linguistic
outcomes of 

migration.  Research dealing with any part of the world and any period of
history

is welcome.  That said, we are really looking for papers that are data-heavy
on two fronts.  On the one hand, we hope that submissions will be based on
extensive linguistic/philological data capturing changes in progress.  On
the other hand, the research should present socio-historical data of
sufficient detail to link the linguistic change described to the demographic
change posited as its cause.  These requirements for the most part limit
appropriate submissions to the early modern or modern periods, but we are
open to projects dealing with any period in history.

Grammaticalization in East Asia

Convener: Kazuha Watanabe (Cal State Fullerton) E-mail:
kwatanabe at Exchange.FULLERTON.EDU

Previous research on grammaticalization in East Asian languages mainly
focuses on the individual changes occurring in a specific language as well
as comparison between examples from Asian languages and previous studies in
European languages as an isolated phenomenon.  For example, while TAM
markers in these languages have been studied extensively, most of the work
concentrates on the development path of individual markers, rather than
change in TAM system as a whole.  In addition, the research data is often
collected from the standard variety of a language, while the dialectal data
is often neglected.  Therefore, this section adopts a systematic approach;
the emphases will be given to an example of grammaticalization which
triggers paradigmatic change, as well as typological findings in East Asian
languages as a whole, in a specific language family, or among dialects of
one language, which differ from the rest of the world.  The systematic
approach to grammaticalization will not only enable us to amalgamate the
previous findings of the individual changes, it will also evaluate their
validity.  

Information structure in historical linguistics

Conveners: Kristin Eide (Trondheim), Roland Hinterhölzl (HU Berlin), Ioanna
Sitaridou (Cambridge)

E-mail: k.g.eide at ilos.uio.no

Recent years have seen a growing interest in the study of information
structure in linguistics. Given that information structure is a fine
exemplification of how ‘division of labour’ works between different
components of the grammar it is hardly surprising to see the rise of
numerous works cast within different frameworks (e.g. OT, minimalism,
discourse-oriented models, phonology-oriented models, etc.). However,
despite how well-studied information structure is in synchronic terms, this
is hardly the case in historical linguistics. The reasons are pretty obvious
since many of the methods used to identify information structure in modern
languages, such as laboratory phonology research, are not available to
historical linguists. Nevertheless, it is now becoming imperative to
investigate the articulation of information structure in historical texts
given that some of our assumptions about word order change for instance
crucially depend on that. The present workshop seeks to provide answers to
the following questions:

(a)          How do we transfer knowledge we have on modern languages
through

laboratory research on phonological phenomena such as sentence intonation
and sentence stress/focus stress to historical linguistics? What methods are
available to us for the identification of information packaging?  How
reliable are these methods?

(b)          What is the interaction between grammar, and in particular,
between

syntax and information structure?

(c)          Is information structure part of syntax, as suggested by the

cartographic approach, or is it outside syntax namely the choice of
particular syntactic structures is guided by specific discourse situations?
What insights can be gained with respect to these questions from the
historical perspective?

(d)          Do we have evidence for grammaticalized information structure
in older

languages? Or, for reshuffling of information structure systems through
different processes?

We encourage submission of abstracts for papers addressing any of the topics
mentioned above. Papers should explicitly draw theoretical implications from
their findings regarding the nature of information structure in the
historical context.

New perspectives on Baltic, Slavic and Balto-Slavic

Conveners: Imke Mendoza (Salzburg), Eugen Hill (München). E-mail:
eugen.hill at lrz.uni-muenchen.de

 “The diachronic relationship between the Baltic and the Slavic languages is
one of the most intriguing puzzles of Indo-European linguistics. Although
these groups of languages constitute two separate branches of Indo-European,
they share an unusually high number of common innovations concerning the
inflectional, derivational and accentual system. Despite many years of
research, the reason for the striking similarity remains unclear. There are
two competing, although not mutually exclusive hypotheses. One assumes an
intermediate Balto-Slavic stage after the break up of Proto-Indo-European.
The other hypothesis seeks to explain the similarities within the framework
of language contact, i.e as a result of their longstanding geographic
relationship. Both positions have been argued, but neither has been
generally accepted. During the last few decades, international research has
concentrated on particular grammatical features of Baltic and Slavic. Most
of these studies while useful, however, focused on either Baltic or Slavic
without taking into account the other language group. The goal of the
workshop therefore is to bring together scholars with expertise in Baltic
and in Slavic and to find some new answers to the old question about the
existence of a Balto-Slavic unity.”

Procedural meanings in diachrony

Conveners:  Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen (Manchester) & Jacqueline Visconti
(Genoa)

This workshop will be concerned with all aspects (descriptive, theoretical
and/or methodological) of the diachronic evolution of procedural meanings,
understood here as linguistic items/constructions that provide instructions
to hearers on how to integrate the contentful elements of the message within
an evolving mental model of the discourse, at both the ideational level
(including, for instance, temporal or causal relations between events, or
the indexing of referents) and the interpersonal level (including,
prominently, indexing the speaker’s attitudes to the discourse and its
participants, and indexing metatextual relationships between propositions or
between propositions and the extra-linguistic context).  Procedural meanings
thus not only include pragmatic items such discourse markers, focus
particles, modal particles, scalar items, interpersonal markers,
approximatives, address terms, markers of information structure, etc., but
also grammatical morphemes and constructions.

Discussion of the explanatory value of the competing notions of
grammaticalization, pragmaticalization, and lexicalization, and proposals
for further refinement of those notions, will be at the center of interest,
as will the question of the causes and mechanisms of semantic/pragmatic
change.  Two main objectives of the workshop will be:

·         to discover whether there are, across languages, characteristic
pathways of diachronic change for grammatical morphemes, on the one hand,
and pragmatic items, on the other;

·         to investigate how meanings that are coded in language structure
arise from language use in actual communication. 

Gender marking

Convener: Gunther de Vogelaer (Ghent) E-mail:gunther.devogelaer at ugent.be

Despite several decades of research, our understanding of grammatical gender
systems is still relatively poor in comparison to other parts of grammar.
The present workshop aims at taking stock of current developments in the
field, tackling question including, but not restricted to, the following:

-              Patterns of change in gender systems: can we find any
regularity in changes that gender systems can undergo? And to what extent
can we derive answers from such patterns with regard to more fundamental
questions such as the quest for triggers in gender change (deflection,
language contact), the function of grammatical gender, or the structure of
gender systems?

-              Loss or renewal of grammatical gender: in Indo-european
languages, most ongoing changes concern the loss of aspects of the gender
system, such as the decrease of the number of genders or the loss of gender
agreement from parts of the grammar (although there are exceptions, such as
the emergence of a ‘neo-neuter’ in varieties of Italian (Haase 2000). Are
there language families where the reverse is observed, i.e. frequent changes
towards more genders or towards more gender agreement? In addition, to what
extent do these innovations match alleged universal pathways such as the one
proposed by Greenberg (1978).

-              The global distribution of grammatical gender: it appears
that gender systems are quite widespread in the world, but not universal
(cf. the WALS). Are there any linguistic properties that facilitate or
inhibit the presence of grammatical gender? And how can such correlations be
explained?

-              Grammatical gender and theories of language change: recent
data, e.g. from Dutch, have shown substantial differences in the way
grammatical gender is acquired in L1 and L2. Hence data on gender change can
be shed some light over the ongoing debate on the role of L1 vs. L2 speakers
in language change.

Complementation In Diachrony

Conveners: Dr. Theodore Markopoulos (Uppsala) and Dr. Christina Sevdali
(Ulster)

E-mail: C.Sevdali at ulster.ac.uk

Complementation is an issue encompassing various domains of linguistic
analysis: syntax, morphology, semantics / pragmatics, and therefore, changes
affecting patterns of complementation can have important repercussions for
the whole morphosyntactic frame of a language. In this workshop, it is our
goal to explore aspects of changes in the complementation system(s) of
languages, including: 

The diachronic paths manifested in argument structure of verbs, as seen in
syntactic, semantic / pragmatic as well as morphological changes related to
specific verbs classes or to the overall verbal domain of a language

The clausal complementation system and, more precisely, issues regarding
finite vs. non-finite complements and how such patterns evolve
diachronically. An interesting example is the case of Greek that has passed
from a predominantly infinitival to an almost entirely finite
complementation system, compared to the case of English which shows an
increasing restriction in the use of finite complements between the Old and
Middle English periods. Factors determining such large-scale changes can be
of paramount interest for historical linguistics since among other things,
they also relate to the question of directionality of language change. 

The nominal complementation patterns and their relation to verbal
complementation and the changes affecting the latter. 

We believe that diachronic paths of complementation have been under-explored
despite their obvious significance, and by this workshop we seek to start
redressing the balance.

Making the best of bad data in historical contact linguistics

Convener: Margot vd Berg  (Nijmegen). E-mail:  <mailto:M.v.d.Berg at let.ru.nl>
M.v.d.Berg at let.ru.nl

Even more than historical linguists working on Dutch, Arabic or Tamil for
example, linguists studying contact languages (pidgins, creoles, koines,
World Englishes etc.) from an historical perspective are faced with the
problem of bad data: In addition to a relative paucity of historical
documents illustrating authentic spoken language, the available documents
that contain information in and on the language derive more often than not
from authors who are not native speakers of the reported language. Can these
documents still be regarded as reliable and representative? What methods do
historical contact linguists use these days to make the best of bad data?
Can bad data influence our notion of language formation? This workshop seeks
to bring together scholars working on contact languages world-wide from an
historical perspective, socio-historical as well as linguistic.
Contributions are solicited that a) address (one of) the questions raised
above, or b) advance a theory of contact language formation on the basis of
new data-driven investigations. Thus, this workshop offers its participants
a taste of state of the art historical contact linguistics.

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