[Lingtyp] Workshop on areal typology of lexicon-semantics at ALT: call for abstracts

Wed Mar 8 08:48:43 UTC 2017

Dear all,

We (Felix Ameka, Antoinette Schapper and myself) are organizing a workshop on Areal typology of lexico-semantics in conjunction with the meeting of the Association for Linguistic Typology in Canberra (Dec. 15th 2017).

We have a few slots open and would like to encourage interested colleagues to get in touch and submit an abstract here: http://www.dynamicsoflanguage.edu.au/alt-conference-2017/call-for-abstracts/

The deadline for abstracts, both in the general and workshops, is the 31st of March.

Please remember that for those with funding problems, there are a limited number of scholarships<http://www.dynamicsoflanguage.edu.au/alt-conference-2017/scholarships/scholarship-application-form/> for researchers are available, applications also due 31 March 2017.

Best regards,
Maria Koptjevskaja Tamm (tamm at ling.su.se), Felix Ameka (felix.ameka at gmail.com) and Antoinette Schapper (a.schapper at gmail.com)

Below follows a longer description of our workshop.

Workshop: Areal typology of lexico-semantics
Morpho-syntactic and phonological features are regularly used by linguists to establish the existence of linguistic areas and construct areally based typologies. By contrast, lexico-semantic phenomena   have, with a few exceptions (e.g. Matisoff 2004, Enfield 2003, Smith-Stark 1994), received remarkably little attention from areal linguistics and areal typology, and little is known about the geographical variation they display. This workshop will advance the discussion on lexico-semantic phenomena showing parallels across languages and how these similarities may be described and accounted for – by universal tendencies, genetic relations among the languages, their contacts and/or their common extra-linguistic surrounding.
The study of lexical phenomena is of course well-established in research on language contact. Loanwords have been studied from a more systematic cross-linguistic perspective, where the core issue has been the varying borrowability of various words, seen as belonging to different parts of speech and/or coming from different semantic domains (cf. Haspelmath and Tadmor eds. 2009, Wohlgemuth 2009). Areal lexico-semantics (Ameka & Wilkins 1996, Koptjevskaja-Tamm & Liljegren in press), by contrast, is concerned not with the way words move from language to language, but with the diffusion of semantic features across language boundaries in a geographical area. For instance, Hayward (1991, 2000, also Treis 2010) points out many shared lexicalization patterns in the three Ethiopian languages Amharic (Semitic), Oromo (Cushitic) and Gamo (Omotic), which add to the cumulative evidence in favour of the Ethio-Erithrean linguistic area and fall into four categories: (i) shared semantic specializations, e.g. ‘die without ritual slaughter (of cattle)’;  (ii) shared polysemy, e.g. ‘draw water’ – ‘copy’; (iii) shared derivational pathways, e.g. ‘need’ = causative of ‘want’: (iv) shared ideophones and idioms, e.g., ‘I caught a cold’ expressed via ‘a cold caught me’. Lexico-semantic parallels have also been systematically used as areality indicators for the Meso-American linguistic area (e.g., Smith-Stark 1994; Brown 2011).
Matisoff (2004), Vanhove (ed. 2008), Zalizniak et al. (2012) and Urban (2012) give numerous examples of cross-linguistically recurrent patterns of polysemy; whilst some reflect universal tendencies, others are clearly areally restricted and witness of language contact. The possibility of using such patterns to track deep time connections between groups has also been put forward (Urban 2009, Schapper et al. 2016). Areal lexico-semantics has significant potential for historical and areal linguistics, but is still awaiting systematic research.
Areal lexico-semantics is a potentially vast field, spanning the convergence of the meanings of individual lexemes, through the structuring of entire semantic domains, to the organization of complete lexicons. For this workshop, we invite contributions that consider the areality of lexico-semantic features as manifested in the general organization of a lexical field, polysemy (colexification) patterns and lexical motivation, collocational patterns etc. We are particularly interested in contributions that have a scope of an area or a larger number of languages and make an attempt at generalizations, where the major concern would be separating contact-induced convergence from inheritance and/or more universal tendencies. However we also welcome contributions dealing with detailed studies of two (or more) languages in contact (e.g. if they look attentively at a particular lexical field and show how it is organized), especially if these are situated within a broader linguistic context, such as comparison with other genetically related languages, and/or relate to findings in lexical-typological research.

References
Ameka, Felix K. and David P. Wilkins. 1996. Semantics. In Goebl, Hans, Peter H. Nelde, Zdeněk Starý and Wolfgang Wölck (eds.), Contact linguistics. An international handbook of contemporary research. 130–138. Berlin / New York: Walter de Gruyter
Brown, Cecil 2011. The role of Nahuatl in the formation of Mesoamerica as a linguistic area. Language Dynamics and Change 1: 171–204.
Enfield, N. J. 2003. Linguistic Epidemiology: Semantics and Grammar of Language Contact in Mainland Southeast Asia. London: RoutledgeCurzon
Haspelmath, Martin and Uri Tadmor (eds.) 2009. Loanwords in the World's Languages: A Comparative Handbook. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Hayward Richard J. 2000. Is There a Metric for Convergence. In Renfrew, C., A. McMahon and L. Trask (eds.), Time Depth in Historical Linguistics Vol 2 (Papers in the Prehistory of Languages), 621–640. Cambridge: The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
Hayward, Richard J. 1991. A propos patterns of lexicalization in the Ethiopian Language Area. In Mendel, D. and U. Claudi (eds.), Ägypten im afroorientalischen Kontext. Special issue of Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere. Cologne: Institute of African Studies, 139–156.
Koptjevskaja Tamm, Maria and Henrik Liljegren. In press. Semantic patterns from an areal perspective. In Hickey, Raymond (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics. Cambridge University Press.
Matisoff, James A. 2004. Areal semantics – Is there such a thing?. In Saxena, Anju (ed.), Himalayan languages: past and present. 347–393. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Schapper, Antoinette, Lila San Roque and Rachel Hender. 2016. Tree, firewood and fire in the languages of Sahul. In Juvonen, Päivi and Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm (eds.), The lexical typology of semantic shifts. 355 – 422. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.
Smith-Stark, Thomas 1994. Mesoamerican calques. In MacKay, Carolyn J. and Verónica Vásques (eds.), Investigaciones Lingüísticas en Mesoamérica. México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 15–50.
Treis, Yvonne. 2010. Perception verbs and taste adjectives in Kambaata and beyond. In Anne Storch, (ed.), Perception of the Invisible. Religion, Historical Semantics and the Role of Perceptive Verbs (SUGIA - Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika, 21) Cologne: Köppe, 313–346.
Urban, Matthias 2009. 'Sun' and 'moon' in the Circum-Pacific language area. Anthropological Linguistics, 51, 3/4: 328–346.
Urban, Matthias. 2012. Analyzibility and semantic associations in referring expressions. A study in comparative lexicology.  PhD diss., Leiden University
Vanhove, Martine (ed.). 2008. From Polysemy to Semantic Change. Amsterdam: John Benjamins
Wohlgemuth, Jan 2009. A typology of verbal borrowings. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Zalizniak, Anna, Maria Bulakh, Dmitry Ganenkov, Ilya Gruntov, Timur Maisak & Maxim Russo 2012. The catalogue of semantic shifts as a database for lexical semantic typology. In Koptjevskaja-Tamm, M. & M. Vanhove (eds.), New directions in lexical typology. A special issue of Linguistics, 50, 3: 633–669.

Prof. Maria Koptjevskaja Tamm
Dept. of linguistics, Stockholm university
106 91 Stockholm, Sweden
tamm at ling.su.se<mailto:tamm at ling.su.se>
www.ling.su.se/tamm<http://www.ling.su.se/tamm>

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