CFP Workshop on 'gender marking' (at ICHL 19)

[Gunther De Vogelaer]

Workshop on 'The diachrony of gender marking' at ICHL 19 (Nijmegen, August 10-15, 2009)

 

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.

 

The workshop on gender will address questions 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.

 

Conveners: 

Gunther De Vogelaer (Flemish Research Foundation / Ghent)

Mark Janse (Ghent)

 

Keynote speakers:

Alexandra Aikhenvald (La Trobe)

Brian Joseph (Ohio State)

Peter Siemund (Hamburg)

 

Abstracts: 

The workshop is part of the ICHL-19 conference, which takes place 10-15 August 2009, at the Radboud University Nijmegen (the Netherlands). Abstracts should be submitted via the ICHL-19 website: http://www.ru.nl/cls/ichl19/. Deadline is 10 January 2009.

 

More information:

please contact gunther.devogelaer at ugent.be or mark.janse at ugent.be
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/histling-l/attachments/20081113/e8591794/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
Histling-l mailing list
Histling-l at mailman.rice.edu
https://mailman.rice.edu/mailman/listinfo/histling-l