Call for papers: ICHL20 workshop on Reconstructing Syntax

Fri Sep 10 20:27:12 UTC 2010

Okay -- I now see the part about construction grammar -- I missed that
on my first reading...

Colleen
On Fri, 10 Sep 2010 17:12:02 +0200, johanna.barddal at UIB.NO wrote:
> 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.