ICHL workshop

[Dorothy Disterheft]

ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS
================================
 
 
Typological change: Causes and course
 
Workshop at 13th International Conference on Historical
Linguistics, Duesseldorf, Friday August 15 1997
 
Research in recent years has increased our knowledge of the possible
causes of typological change. Internal motivation, such as the
operation of Wackernagel's Law or the promotion of topicalised
word-order to canonical word-order, is now seen to have played a
distinct role in the development of well-known cases such as English
and German. Less mainstream language groups such as Celtic have gone
through a shift to an unusual type in a relatively short time which
could imply the impact of external forces, i.e. contact with substrates
which imposed their native word order. These are standard issues in
typology but the field is taken to cover more than this and to touch on
other aspects of language structure in a cross-linguistic context.
    The intention of the proposed workshop is to bring together
colleagues working in the broad area of typology and to present
material and discuss issues concerning both how typological change
could have been triggered and what course a change takes once
established. We hope that these matters can also be illuminated by
colleagues who are working outside the context of Indo-European to
provide additional perspectives for the workshop.
    The focus is expected to be syntactic, but hopefully in a broad
sense which would encompass such aspects as grammatical relations and
hierarchies, iconicity, conceptual distance, notions of prototypes and
markedness, competing motivation and alternative strategies in sentence
structure. The unifying factor is the relevance to typological change
and development and colleagues interested in this field are cordially
invited to register.
    The workshop is planned for Friday August 15 1997. There will be
approximately 6 hours for papers and discussion, assuming that it
starts at 9 in the morning and continues until mid-afternoon with a
short break for lunch (the finishing time will be between 3 and 4 as
the ICHL business meeting is scheduled for late afternoon). This time
could be divided into 10 slots of 30 mins each (20 mins presentation,
10 mins discussion) with a concluding discussion. This arrangement is
at present a suggestion and depends on the number of colleagues who
might be interested in participating.
    For a maximum degree of effectiveness we suggest that participants
first register and then, on confirmation, send us a pre-version of
their paper in which their standpoint, hypotheses, tentative
conclusions, etc. are outlined succinctly. This material can be
disseminated to other participants in the workshop to ensure that
everyone is appropriately informed about the subject matter of each
contribution. The first step, however, is to get into contact with
either Columbia or Essen by 31st March 1997 so that the arrangements
for time slots and the workshop programme can be made in April and
material disseminated quickly.
 
Raymond Hickey                  Dorothy Disterheft
English Linguistics             Linguistics Program
Essen University                University of South Carolina
Germany                         Columbia, SC 29208
 
email: r.hickey at uni-essen.de    email: disterh at univscvm.csd.scarolina.edu