Call for papers: ICHL20 workshop on Reconstructing Syntax

Fri Sep 10 15:06:02 UTC 2010

First call for papers

ICHL-20 in Osaka, Japan, 24-30 July 2011
Workshop title: Reconstructing Syntax
Organizer: Jóhanna Barðdal, University of Bergen

Description:

Historical-comparative reconstruction has traditionally been focused  
on lexical, morphological and phonological comparisons, while  
syntactic reconstruction has either been systematically left  
unattended, regarded as fruitless or uninteresting, or even rebuked  
(cf. Watkins 1964, Jeffers 1976, Lightfoot 1979, 2006, Harrison 2003,  
Pires & Thomason 2008, Mengden 2008, inter alia). The reason for this  
is that syntactic structures have been regarded as fundamentally  
different from, for instance, morphological structures, in several  
respects. That is, syntactic structures are larger and more complex  
units than morphological units. Semantically they have not been  
regarded on par with morphological units either, in that their meaning  
is regarded as the sum of the meaning of the lexical parts that  
instantiate them, and because of this semantic compositionality they  
have not been regarded as being arbitrary form?meaning correspondences  
like words. It has also been argued in the literature that syntactic  
structures are not inherited in the same way as the vocabulary  
(Lightfoot 1979 and later work), that there is no cognate material to  
compare when comparing sentences across daughter languages (Jeffers  
1976), there is no regularity of syntactic change, as opposed to the  
regularity of phonological change (Lightfoot 2002, Pirus & Thomason  
2008), and that there is no arbitrariness found in syntax (Harrison  
2003), all of which render syntactic reconstruction fundamentally  
different from phonological reconstruction.

Recent work within historical-comparative syntax takes issue with this  
view of syntactic reconstruction (Kikusawa 2003, Harris 2008, Bauern  
2008, Barðdal & Eythórsson 2009, Barðdal 2010), arguing that the  
concepts of "cognate status," "arbitrariness" and "regularity" are  
non-problematic for syntactic reconstruction. This is so, first,  
because cognates are also found in syntax (Kikusawa 2003, Barðdal &  
Eythórsson 2009, Barðdal 2010). Second, because the arbitrariness  
requirement is simply not needed in syntax, as it's role is first and  
foremost to aid in deciding on genetic relatedness, which is usually  
not an issue when doing syntactic reconstruction (Harrison 2003,  
Barðdal & Eythórsson 2009, Barðdal 2010). And, third, because a) the  
sound laws are only regular by definition (Hoenigswald 1987), and b)  
the sound laws are basically stand-ins for a similarity metric when  
deciding upon cognate status (Harrison 2003).

This ICHL workshop aims at accommodating contributions including, but  
not limited to, the following:

- The fundamental issues of reconstruction in general and syntactic  
reconstruction in particular
- Individual case studies of syntactic reconstruction from different  
languages and language families
- A comparison of how different theoretical frameworks may contribute  
to syntactic reconstruction (see, for instance, recent claims by  
Barðdal & Eythórsson 2009 and Barðdal 2010 that Construction Grammar  
is more easily extendible to syntactic reconstruction than other  
frameworks, due to the basic status of form?meaning/function pairings  
in that framework. And that there is a natural leap from synchronic  
form?meaning pairings to historical reconstruction, based on  
form?meaning pairings).

Please send your abstracts of 500 words or less to Jóhanna Barðdal  
(Johanna.Barddal at uib.no), no later than November 15th 2010, preferably  
in pdf-format. A response on abstracts will be sent out on December  
15th 2010.

References:

Barðdal, Jóhanna. 2010. Construction-Based Historical-Comparative  
Reconstruction. To appear in Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar.  
Eds. Graeme Trousdale & Thomas Hoffmann. Oxford: Oxford University  
Press.

Barðdal, Jóhanna & Thórhallur Eythórsson. 2010. Reconstructing Syntax:  
Construction Grammar and the Comparative Method. To appear in  
Sign-Based Construction Grammar. Eds. Hans C. Boas & Ivan A. Sag.  
Stanford: CSLI Publications.

Bowern, Claire. 2008. Syntactic Change and Syntactic Reconstruction in  
Generative Grammar. In Principles of Syntactic Reconstruction. Eds.  
Gisela Ferraresi & Maria Goldbach, 187-216. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Ferraresi, Gisella & Maria Goldbach (eds.). 2008. Principles of  
Syntactic Reconstruction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Harris, Alice C. 2008. Reconstruction in Syntax: Reconstruction of  
Patterns. In Principles of Syntactic Reconstruction. Eds. Gisela  
Ferraresi & Maria Goldbach, 73-95. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Harrison, S. P. 2003. On the Limits of the Comparative Method. In The  
Handbook of Historical Linguistics, eds. B. D. Joseph & R. D. Janda,  
343-368. Oxford: Blackwell.

Hoenigswald, H. M. 1987. The Annus Mirabilis 1876 and Posterity.  
Transactions of the Philological Society 76(1): 17-35.

Jeffers, Robert J. 1976. Syntactic Change and Syntactic  
Reconstruction. In Current Progress in Historical Linguistics:  
Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Historical  
Linguistics, ed. William M. Christie, Jr., 1-15, Amsterdam.

Kikusawa, Ritsuko. 2003. The Development of Some Indonesian Pronominal  
Systems. Historical Linguistics 2001: Selected Papers from the 15th  
International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Melbourne, 13-17  
August 2001, eds. Barry J. Blake, Kate Burridge & Jo Taylor, 237-268.  
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Lightfoot, David. 1979. Principles of Diachronic Syntax. Cambridge:  
Cambridge University Press.

Lightfoot, David W. 2002. Myths and the Prehistory of Grammars.  
Journal of Linguistics 38(1): 113-136.

Lightfoot, David. 2006. How New Languages Emerge. Cambridge: Cambridge  
University Press.

Mengden, Ferdinand von. 2008. Reconstructing Complex Structures: A  
Typological Perspective. In Principles of Syntactic Reconstruction.  
Eds. Gisela Ferraresi & Maria Goldbach, 97-119. Amsterdam: John  
Benjamins.

Pires, Acrisio & Sarah G. Thomason. 2008. How Much Syntactic  
Reconstruction is Possible? In Principles of Syntactic Reconstruction.  
Eds. Gisela Ferraresi & Maria Goldbach, 27-72. Amsterdam: John  
Benjamins.

Watkins, Calvert. 1964. Preliminaries to the reconstruction of  
Indo-European sentence structure. In Proceedings of the IX  
International Congress of Linguists, ed. H.G. Lunt, 1035?1045. The  
Hague: Mouton.

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Jóhanna Barðdal
Research Associate Professor
Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies
University of Bergen
P.O. box 7805
NO-5020 Bergen
Norway
johanna.barddal at uib.no

Phone +47-55582438 (work)
Phone +47-55201117 (home)
Fax   +47-55589660 (work)

http://org.uib.no/iecastp/barddal
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