CFP: Creating Infrastructure for Canonical Typology

[Anna Kibort]

FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

Creating Infrastructure for Canonical Typology
9-10 January 2009
Conference hosted by the Surrey Morphology Group

Call deadline: 29 August 2008

Papers are invited for a two-day conference addressing issues relevant for 
the creation of an online infrastructure for Canonical Typology (Corbett 
2005, 2006).  Linguists' intuitions about what are particular instances of 
a phenomenon, such as a case or agreement, can differ because of 
differences in the choice of criteria which they take to be definitional. 
The canonical approach allows us to address these differences by taking 
defining properties and placing them in a multidimensional space. In this 
way, we can treat, for example, issues of whether particular constructions 
fit under the rubric 'agreement' or 'case' as a matter of greater or 
lesser proximity to a canonical ideal. An ontology for this approach 
therefore requires a mapping out of the criteria that linguistic 
typologists use for defining linguistic constructs.

The Surrey Morphology Group proposes to bring together linguists from 
different perspectives to outline the issues relevant for the creation of 
an ontology for Canonical Typology in the form of a Community of Practice 
Extension (COPE) within the GOLD ontology for linguistics (Farrar and 
Langendoen 2003; see also: www.linguistics-ontology.org/gold.html). 
Contributions may address the following issues: the canonical criteria for 
defining different morphosyntactic features (case, gender, number, etc.); 
defining canonical criteria for syntax-morphology interaction (agreement, 
government, head, modifier, etc.); practical issues for the fieldworker; 
issues of computational implementation and reasoning. We invite papers on 
these and related topics from computational linguists, fieldworkers, 
typologists, as well as researchers working on ontologies.

Confirmed speakers:

- Nicholas Evans (Australian National University)
- Scott Farrar (University of Washington)
- Frank Seifart (Ruhr-Universität Bochum)

Anonymous abstracts (500 word maximum) should be sent as an attachment by 
e-mail to a.kibort at surrey.ac.uk by 29 August 2008, with contact 
information contained in the body of the message. Notification of 
acceptance will be sent by 31 October 2008. Any questions may also be 
sent to the above address.

The conference will be held at the University of Surrey, in Guildford, UK.
Guildford is a market town in the Green Belt surrounding London and is
located about 35 minutes by train from central London and within easy
reach of London's Heathrow and Gatwick airports.

References

Corbett, Greville G. 2005. The canonical approach in typology. In: Zygmunt 
Frajzyngier, Adam Hodges and David S. Rood (eds) Linguistic Diversity and 
Language Theories. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 25-49.

Corbett, Greville G. 2006. Agreement. Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press.

Farrar, Scott and D. Terence Langendoen. 2003. A linguistic ontology for 
the Semantic Web. GLOT International 7(3), 97-100.