CfP: Quantitative Linguistic Typology: State-of-the-Art and Beyond, Deadline January 15

[Ljuba Veselinova]

Quantitative Linguistic Typology: State-of-the-Art and Beyond

Convenor: Harald Hammarström

There is increasing awareness that the only strict yes/no language
universals to be found in the languages of the world are trivial
(Evans & Levinson 2009) and that most of the interesting variation
comes in the form of tendencies and patterns. While not everything in
language can be weighted and measured, many aspects do lend themselves
to a quantitative analysis.

Coupled with the recent explosion of data in digital form (a trend
punctuated by the appearance of WALS), the field of Linguistic
Typology is now fully equipped – and perhaps required – to address its
fundamental questions quantitatively.

The proposed theme session aims to cover quantitative approaches to
linguistic typology ranging from the use of basic statistical
techniques (such as regression analysis, or constructing a stratified
typological sample, Cysouw 2005) to full-fledged models for explaining
diversity and similarity of the languages of the world:

Methods and models for discovering and measuring dependencies between
structural features of languages
Methods and models for separating the effects of genealogy, areality,
universal tendencies and randomness in the make-up of languages
Methods and models for hypothesis testing in linguistic typology
Methods and models for studying the interaction of linguistic and
non-linguistic features
Empirical results of contrasting different (quantitative or
non-quantitative) approaches to typology

In particular, the proposed theme session aims to offer the
typological community a state-of-the-art snapshot (by the convenors)
of what quantitative methods can (and can not) do, as well as
presentations (by external submissions) advancing the state of
knowledge in the field.


References

Cysouw, Michael (2005). Quantitative methods in typology. In Altmann,
G., Köhler, R., and Piotrowski, R., editors, Quantitative Linguistik:
ein internationales Handbuch, pages 554–578. Mouton de Gruyter.

Evans, Nick and Levinson, Stephen (2009). The myth of language
universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive
science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32(5):429–492.




Submission -- Deadline January 15, 2013:

Send your abstract as an email attachment to: ALT10 AT eva.mpg.de.

Subject header: (your name) ALT 10 abstract

Include these things in the body of the email:

- Authors’ names
- Abstract title
- Contact information: email, phone, fax

Note: One individual may be involved in a maximum of two abstracts
(maximum of one as sole author), regardless of category (oral, poster,
theme-session talk).

Maximum length: 500 words or 1 single-spaced page

Please put this information at the top of your abstract:

- Abstract title
- Abstract category (oral, poster, oral/poster)
- Theme session

Format: If at all possible, please send your abstract as a pdf.

Name: Give your pdf a filename similar to the subject header.

Anonymity: Abstracts must be anonymous: do not put your name or other
identifying information on the abstract. Also, please anonymize your
pdf by removing identifying information.

Further Information:

http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/conference/2013_ALT10/files/call_for_papers.html
http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/conference/2013_ALT10/files/theme_sessions.html


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