Reminder: possible workshop at for ICHL22, 27-31 July 2015, Naples

Wed Sep 3 15:58:06 UTC 2014

Space in diachrony

we would like to call your attention on our
proposal for a workshop at ICHL 22 in Naples
(27-31 July 2015). The workshop hasn't been
accepted yet, but for the proposal we need a list
of possible titles. We invite to send us a title
by September 10th if you are interested. If our
proposal is accepted, you will have to send an
abstract following the instructions in the ICHL web page:  www.ichl22.unina.it

Send your reactions to:
Silvia Luraghi <silvia.luraghi at unipv.it
<https://mailman.rice.edu/mailman/listinfo/histling-l>>
Tatiana Nikitina <tavnik at gmail.com
<https://mailman.rice.edu/mailman/listinfo/histling-l>>

Important dates:
Deadline for workshop proposals: 20 September 2014
Notification of acceptance of workshop proposals: 20 October 2014
Deadline for submission of abstracts for general
sessions and workshops: 30 January 2015
Notification of acceptance of papers for general
sessions and workshops: 30 March 2015

Workshop proposal for ICHL22, 27-31 July 2015, Naples

  Spatial relations in diachrony

Convenors:
Silvia Luraghi, University of Pavia
Tatiana Nikitina, CNRS
Chiara Zanchi, University of Pavia

The workshop addresses changes in the coding of
spatial relations, with a focus on the coding of
similarities and differences among spatial
relations, or among variants of the same spatial
relation. Topics that we would like to discuss
include the source-goal asymmetry, differential
marking of spatial relations, polysemy or lack of
polysemy among markers of spatial relations, and
the related diachronic developments.

Asymmetries between goals and sources
Recent research has demonstrated a number of
differences in the encoding of goals and sources
of motion. In general, goals of motion are
expressed more frequently and in more
fine-grained ways than sources
(<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2010.01107.x/full#b56>Stefanowitsch
& Rohde 2004;
<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2010.01107.x/full#b54>Regier
& Zheng 2007, inter alia). The asymmetry also
shows up in more subtle syntactic phenomena:
unlike sources, which often behave as adjuncts,
goals tend to share properties with verbal
arguments, and they are also more likely than
sources to be incorporated in the argument
structure of verbal applicatives (Baker 1988;
Filip 2003). Patterns of polysemy within systems
of spatial marking also point in the same
direction: static locations are commonly coded by
the same markers as goals of motion, and in a way
distinct from sources (Blake 1977, Noonan 2009,
Nikitina 2009, Pantcheva 2010, Zwarts 2010). Not
that this pattern of polysemy means that
diachronic mergers of source and location are not
attested; much to the contrary, many individual
locative markers in European languages – such as
French dedans ‘inside’ or Ancient Greek
ópisthe(n) ‘behind’ – often go back to ablative
expressions, suggesting an earlier
ablative-locative transfer (Mackenzie 1978 with
examples from the Indo-European language phylum,
Israeli Hebrew, and two Austronesian languages,
Fijian and Sonsorol-Tobi). What seems clear from
the evidence adduced by Mackenzie, as well as
from other instances of the semantic extension
described above (cf., for example, Bennett 1989,
Nikitina & Spano 2014, Luraghi 2009 and 2010a),
is that once a marker acquires the locative
meaning, it loses the original ablative meaning.
Thus, while the extension from source to location
is attested, possibly even more frequently than
commonly believed, polysemy tends to be avoided.
Note, however, that special types of landmarks
(spatial referents, human beings) often allow
some overlap in the use of ablative and locative
encoding, and can be at the origin of
ablative-locative transfers (Eckhoff, Thomason,
de Swart  2013, Luraghi 2009 and 2014). What
accounts for the difference between the observed
synchronic patterns of spatial encoding, which
tend to conflate static locations and goals, and
the frequently attested individual instances of
ablative-locative syncretism? How do
ablative-locative transfers come about? How do
different types of goal-source asymmetry develop historically?

Differential marking of landmarks
The encoding of certain spatial relations depends
on the type of landmark, and non-conventional
landmarks (e.g. human beings) often require
special types of encoding (Luraghi 2011). With
time, such differential marking may give rise to
markers that are no longer obviously related to
the original spatial concept. For example, the
dative has been argued to be “genetically nothing
else than an offshoot of the locative used with
personal nouns” (Kurylowicz 1964: 190; cf. also
Aristar 1996). How do patterns of differential
marking of landmarks develop and what are their
conditioning factors? What types of spatial
relation are more likely to produce such asymmetries?
What is the possible relation between the
comitative, which implies the simultaneous
involvement of two entities (often human beings)
in a single event, and the locative, which
implies physical coincidence or at least
proximity? Diachronically, comitative markers
seem to arise from markers of static location;
however, synchronic locative-comitative polysemy
seems to be avoided, just like the
locative-ablative polysemy. More research is
needed on the diachronic relation between spatial
and comitative markers, as at present, most
evidence comes from Indo-European languages
(Stolz, Luraghi 2014). If location indeed
functions as a source of comitatives
cross-linguistically, what accounts for the
virtual absence of synchronic polysemy between the two semantic roles?

Asymmetries in the encoding of path
As compared to sources and goals of motion, the
role of path remains largely understudied. In the
light of cross-linguistic coding tendencies, goal
(allative), source/origin (ablative), and
(static) location (locative) seem to be more
‘basic’ spatial relations than path. As argued in
Stolz (1992: 30), there is a tendency for case
marking related to spatial relations to exhibit
‘Dreigliedrigkeit’, i.e. a tripartite structure
featuring dedicated coding devices for location,
direction and source. Indeed, path can often be
coded through cases/adpositions that usually
indicate location, as in English Mary walks in
the field. / The child is running in the street.
How are different kinds of path encoded, and
where does this encoding come from? How is the
distinction between unidirectional and
multidirectional paths represented in different
languages, and how does it develop historically?

The workshop addresses these and other issues in
order to better understand the nature of
asymmetries in the encoding of spatial relations
and shed light on the diachronic relationship
between goals, sources, paths, and static locations.

List of possible participants with tentative titles

References

Aristar, Anthony Rodriguez. 1996. The
relationship between dative and locative:
Kurylowicz’s argument from a typological perspective. Diachronica 13: 207-224.
Baker, Mark C. 1988. Incorporation: A theory of
grammatical function changing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bennett, David C. 1989. Ablative-locative
transfers: evidence from Slovene and Serbo-Croat.
Oxford Slavonic Papers 22: 133-154.
Blake, Barry J. 1977. Case marking in Australian
languages. No. 23 in Linguistic Series. Canberra:
Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies.
Eckhoff, Hanne Martine, Olga A. Thomason and
Peter de Swart. 2013. Mapping out the Source
domain. Studies in Language 37/2: 302–355.
Filip, Hana. 2003. Prefixes and the delimitation
of events. Journal of Slavic Linguistics 11: 55–101.
Luraghi, Silvia 2009. A model for representing
polysemy: The Italian preposition da. In Jacques
François, Eric Gilbert, Claude Guimier, Maxi
Krause, éds. Actes du Colloque “Autour de la
préposition”, Caen, Presses Universitaires de Caen, 167-178.
Luraghi, Silvia. 2010. Adverbial Phrases. In A
New Historical Syntax of Latin, Ph. Baldi and P.
Cuzzolin (eds.). Berlin/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 19-107.
Luraghi, Silvia. 2011. Human landmarks in spatial
expressions: from Latin to Romance. In S.
Kittilä, K. Västi, J. Ylikoski (eds.), Case,
Animacy and Semantic Roles. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 207-234.
Luraghi, Silvia. 2014. Plotting diachronic
semantic maps. The role of metaphor. In S.
Luraghi & H. Narrog, eds., Perspectives on
Semantic Roles. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 99-150.
Mackenzie, J. Lachlan. 1978. Ablative-locative
transfers and their relevance for the theory of
case-grammar. Journal of Linguistics 14: 129-375.
Nikitina, Tatiana. 2009. Subcategorization
pattern and lexical meaning of motion verbs: A
study of the Source/Goal ambiguity. Linguistics 47: 1113-41.
Nikitina, Tatiana and Marianna Spano. 2014.
'Behind' and 'in front' in Ancient Greek: A case
study in orientation asymmetry. In On Ancient
Grammars of Space: Linguistic research on the
expression of spatial relations and motion in
ancient languages, S. Kutscher & D. Werning
(eds). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 67-82.
Noonan, Michael. 2009. Patterns of development,
patterns of syncretism of relational morphology
in the Bodic languages. In The Role of Semantics
and Pragmatics in the Development of Case, J.
Barðdal and S. Celliah (eds.). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, 261-282.
Pantcheva, Marina. 2010. The syntactic structure
of Locations, Goals, and Sources. Linguistics 48/5: 1043-1081.
Regier, Terry & Mingyu Zheng. 2007. Attention to
endpoints: A cross-linguistic constraint on
spatial meaning. Cognitive Science 31: 705–719.
Stefanowitsch, Anatol & Ada Rohde. 2004. The goal
bias in the encoding of motion events. In Studies
in Linguistic Motivation, G. Radden &
K.-U.Panther (eds.). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 249-268.
Stolz, Thomas, Cornelia Stroh and Aina Urdze.
2006. On comitatives and Related Categories. A
Typological Study with Special Focus on the
Languages of Europe. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Stolz, Thomas. 1992. Lokalkasussysteme.  Wilhelmsfeld: Gottfried Egert Verlag.
Zwarts, Joost. 2010. A hierarchy of locations:
Evidence from the encoding of direction in
adpositions and cases. Linguistics 48: 983-1009.

-- 
Silvia Luraghi
Università di Pavia
Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici, Sezione di Linguistica Teorica e Applicata
Strada Nuova 65
I-27100 Pavia
tel.: +39/0382/984685
Web page personale:
http://lettere.unipv.it/diplinguistica/docenti.php?&id=68
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/histling-l/attachments/20140903/fe03812f/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
Histling-l mailing list
Histling-l at mailman.rice.edu
https://mailman.rice.edu/mailman/listinfo/histling-l