Conference announcement: Shared grammaticalization in the Transeurasian languages

Sun Jun 12 15:32:38 UTC 2011

[Apologies for cross-postings]

We are pleased to announce the programme of the symposium on Shared grammaticalization in the Transeurasian languages, dedicated to Lars Johanson's 75th birthday.
SYMPOSIUM
SHARED GRAMMATICALIZATION IN THE TRANSEURASIAN LANGUAGES

University of Leuven, Belgium
September 21-23, 2011

Organizers

Martine Robbeets  (University of Leuven & University of Mainz)

Martine_robbeets at hotmail.com<mailto:Martine_robbeets at hotmail.com>

Hubert Cuyckens (University of Leuven)

Hubert.cuyckens at arts.kuleuven.be<mailto:Hubert.cuyckens at arts.kuleuven.be>

Symposium website: http://www.arts.kuleuven.be/gramm/

MEETING DESCRIPTION

Shared grammaticalization refers to the state whereby two or more languages have the input and the output of a grammaticalization process in common. The shared grammaticalization may have arisen independently in each of them by universal principles of grammatical change, it may have been induced by language contact, or it may have been inherited, either from the ancestral language, when the languages were one and the same or through "parallel drift", after the languages were disconnected. Universal principles are at work, for instance, in the shared grammaticalization of a verb 'go' into a future marker by genealogically and areally unrelatable languages such as English in Europe, Zulu in Africa, Quechua in South America and Tamil in Asia. A classical example of contact-induced grammaticalization is the copying of aspectual meanings on certain originally independent verbs, such as the copying of progressive aspect on the verb eraman 'to carry' in southern Basque under influence of the grammaticalized progressive meaning of the Spanish verb llevar 'to carry' (Jendraschek 2007: 157). A prototypical case of inheritance is the shared grammaticalization of the Romance future markers; Romance languages globally share a root for the verb 'have'  such as French avoir, Spanish haber, Portuguese haver and Italian avere as well as the grammaticalized future marker as in French chante-rons, Spanish canta-ré, Portuguese canta-rei and Italian cante-rémo 'we will sing', reflecting a process of grammaticalization that took place in the ancestral language.

                The approaches taken by the speakers will be either theoretical, reflecting upon shared grammaticalization in a cross-linguistic sample of languages, or experimental, investigating shared grammaticalization between two or more Transeurasian languages or between a Transeurasian language and unrelated languages. We use Transeurasian in reference to a large group of geographically adjacent languages, traditionally known as "Altaic". They share a significant number of linguistic properties and include at most five different linguistic families: Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic.

The goal of the workshop is to shed light on instances of shared grammaticalization and the factors triggering them, with a special focus on the Transeurasian languages.

Specific issues to be addressed include, among others:

- Is it possible to distinguish between the different determinants of shared grammaticalization: universals, contact or inheritance?

- What is the exact impact of language contact and common ancestorship on the grammaticalisation process?

- Is it possible to borrow grammaticalization per se, as a historical process?

- Heine and Kuteva (2005) delimit their description of contact-induced grammaticalization to selective semantic copying, in their terms "replication", but are there examples of globally copied grammaticalization?

- Where do instances of so-called "grammatical accomodation" (Aikhenvald 2002: 5, 239; 2007: 24), namely the development of a native morpheme on the model of the syntactic function of a phonetically similar morpheme in the model language, fit in? Are these cases of contact-induced grammaticalization?

- Do we find examples of "parallel drift" (Sapir 1921: 157-182, LaPolla 1994) in  the Transeurasian languages or beyond? Is there evidence to support this specific type of grammaticalization in genealogical units whereby under influence of a common origin the same grammaticalization processes occur repeatedly but independently in each of the languages?

PRESENTATIONS

Areal diffusion and parallelism in drift: shared grammaticalization patterns

Alexandra Aikhenvald (Cairns)

On Contact-Induced Grammaticalization: Internally or Externally Induced?

Bernd Heine (Cologne)

Shared grammaticalization in isomorphic processes

Lars Johanson (Mainz)

Demystifying 'Drift' - A Variationist Account

Brian Joseph (Columbus, OH)

On  the diachrony of 'even' constructions

Volker Gast (Jena) & Johan van der Auwera (Antwerp)

Contact and parallel developments in Cape York Peninsula, Australia

Jean-Christophe Verstraete (Leuven)

Temporalization of Turkic aspectual systems

Hendrik Boeschoten (Mainz)

Growing apart in shared grammaticalization

Éva Csató (Uppsala)

Biverbal constructions in Altaic

Irina Nevskaya (Frankfurt)

The indefinite article in the Qinghai-Gansu Sprachbund

Hans Nugteren (Amsterdam)

Personal Pronouns in "Core Altaic".

Juha Janhunen (Helsinki)

Origin and development of possessive suffixes and predicative personal endings in some Mongolic languages

Béla Kempf (Budapest)

Grammaticalization of a purpose clause marker in ?ven - contact or independent innovation?

Brigitte Pakendorf (Leipzig)

Verbalization and insubordination in Siberian languages

Andrej Malchukov (Mainz)

Emphatic reduplication in Korean, Kalkha Mongolian and other Altaic languages

Jaehoon Yeon (London)

Comparative grammaticalization in Japanese and Korean

Heiko Narrog & Seongha Rhee (Sendai & Seoul)

Inherited grammaticalization and Sapirian drift in the Transeurasian family

Martine Robbeets (Leuven / Mainz)

Japanese hypotheticals, conditionals, and provisionals: a cautionary tale

Jim Unger (Columbus, OH)

To REGISTER, please complete the REGISTRATION FORM, available from the registration page on the symposium  website http://www.arts.kuleuven.be/gramm/

Deadline for registration: 11 September 2011

A detailed program, information on payment, as well as Information on Travel and Accommodation can be found on the symposium website http://www.arts.kuleuven.be/gramm/. Please contact Martine Robbeets martine_robbeets at hotmail.com<mailto:martine_robbeets at hotmail.com> or hubert.cuyckens at arts.kuleuven.be<mailto:hubert.cuyckens at arts.kuleuven.be> for any additional information.

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