DGfS 2014 Workshop on Grammatical Categories in Macro- and Microcomparative Linguistics

[Martin Haspelmath]

Call for abstracts:

DGfS 2014 Workshop:
"Grammatical Categories in Macro- and Microcomparative Linguistics"

Marburg, Germany, 5-7 March 2014
Meeting URL:     http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/conference/2014_DGfS/

Workshop Coordinators:

Aria Adli (Humboldt University Berlin)
Andreas Dufter (LMU Munich)
Martin Haspelmath (MPI-EVA Leipzig)

Invited Speaker:

Balthasar Bickel (U Zurich)

Description:

This workshop will address the question which categories can be used to 
compare languages. The older practice of describing all languages with 
the categories of European languages has been discredited since the 
early 20th century: We know that languages have very different 
categories, and Boas (1911) urged linguists to describe each language in 
its own terms, i.e. with its own categories. This view was widespread in 
the structuralist period around the middle of the 20th century (e.g. 
Glinz 1952), but it also meant that is was no longer clear how to 
compare languages if each has different categories.

With the advent of generative grammar, the prevailing view since the 
1960s came to be that the categories of different languages are after 
all much more similar than claimed by the structuralists, and it was 
often assumed without discussion that categories like verb, noun, 
determiner, complementizer, 3rd person, plural, subject, specifier, 
wh-element, anaphor (or the features that constitute these categories) 
are universal or universally available. At the same time, successes in 
empirical world-wide comparison such as Greenberg (1963), Keenan & 
Comrie (1977) and Dahl (1985) seemed to confirm that languages again and 
again show the same categories.

But the last years have seen a resurgence of the controversy: While 
Newmeyer (2007) defends the standard view of generative grammar, others 
such as Dryer (1997), Croft (2001) and Haspelmath (2007, 2010) returned 
to the Boasian view that each language has its own categories, so that 
language comparison must make use of a special set of comparative 
concepts. These can be typological grammatical concepts (such as S, A, P 
for the ergative-accusative distinction), or nonverbal stimuli like 
pictures and videos which are often used in lexical typology.

Call for abstracts

Please send an anonymous one-page abstract for a 30-minute presentation 
to categories_dgfs2014 at gmx.de (as a PDF attachment).

Important Dates

Deadline for submission: August 31, 2013
Notification of acceptance: September 15, 2013
Workshop: March 5-7, 2014

The workshop will be part of DGfS 2014 in Marburg (see 
http://www.online.uni-marburg.de/dgfs2014/index.php?sprache=english&seite=homep)