"Comparing Diachronies" - call for papers - reminder!

[Horst Simon]

[this is to remind you of the approaching deadline for the following 
workshop; apologies for cross-posting]


Comparing Diachronies (Workshop at DGfS 2008)

Date: 27-Feb-2008 - 29-Feb-2008
Location: Bamberg, Germany
Meeting Email: germlingconf at kcl.ac.uk

Call Deadline: 20-Aug-2007

Meeting Description:
Workshop as part of the 29th Annual Meeting of the German Society for
Linguistics (DGfS) at the University of Bamberg, Germany (27th-29th 
February, 2008)

Comparing Diachronies

Organizers:
Jürg Fleischer (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Horst Simon (King's College London)

Keynote Speakers:
Bernd Heine (University of Cologne)
Giuseppe Longobardi (University of Trieste)


Assessing the relative importance of internal and external factors is of
paramount importance for any theory of language change. While it is the 
aim of
the study of internal factors to identify correlations between 
diachronic
developments belonging to different subsystems (e.g., loss of case 
morphology
entails fixation of word order), in studying external factors one tries 
to
establish the influence of language contact, normative settings, etc. 
However,
explanations of actual language change phenomena often stick to their 
particular
problems. Only rarely do researchers attempt at generalizations that go 
beyond
individual cases. Thus, in our view one central question for any theory 
of
language change is:

Couldn't things have developed in an entirely different way?

Our workshop ''Comparing Diachronies'' tries to fill a gap: By 
comparing various
diachronic developments we hope to identify differences and divergences 
that
allow for generalizable insights with respect to the functioning and
implementation of linguistic change.
In this perspective, research topics such as the following become 
interesting:
- In the history of English (similar in French), older tendencies to use
verb-second were given up, whereas in German the original tendency 
eventually
led to the generalization of verb-second in main clauses.
- In High German the tense system was reduced, whereas Low German 
reduced its
mood system.
- Only in High German do we find affricates, a class of phonemes 
foreign to
other West Germanic languages.
- In some Romance languages (e.g. Spanish), animate direct objects are 
marked
with the preposition normally used with indirect objects, a development 
which is
completely unknown in other Romance languages (e.g. French).
- Punjabi and Marathi have reduced the original Indo-Aryan ergative 
marking on
some personal pronouns (Bengali and Sinhala have done so completely), 
while in
other languages (e.g. Hindi/Urdu and Nepali) these pronouns have 
retained their
ergative morphology.
- Some Nakh-Dagestan languages have a phoneme system with only three 
vowels
(e.g. Avar dialects), whereas others display as many as 33 vowels (e.g. 
Chechen).

We invite contributions discussing language change phenomena of all 
linguistic
subsystems in a comparative perspective. Papers relating to different 
dialects
of a single language or to different languages of a larger genetic 
entity are as
welcome as work comparing developments in unrelated languages. 
Contributions
focusing on theoretical accounts or on modeling language change are 
especially
encouraged.

There will be talks in 30 and 60 minute slots, including discussion 
time. Note
that contributors can present only one paper at the DGfS Annual Meeting 
as a
whole. Conference languages are English and German. Please send an 
anonymous
abstract of max. 500 words, as a Word- or pdf- file, to

germlingconf at kcl.ac.uk

by Aug 20th, 2007.

Notification of acceptance or rejection will be sent by email in 
September.

For further information please contact:
Jürg Fleischer <jfleisch at staff.hu-berlin.de> or
Horst Simon <horst.simon at kcl.ac.uk>

--------------------
Dr Horst Simon
Department of German
King’s College London
Strand
London, WC2R 2LS
United Kingdom

phone:	+44 (0) 20 7848 2127
fax:		+44 (0) 20 7848 2089
email:	horst.simon at kcl.ac.uk

www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/german/staff/horstsimon.html
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/enriched
Size: 4390 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20070806/f2a1c533/attachment.bin>