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

[sobolev at staff.uni-marburg.de]

Dear colleagues,

let me draw your attention to the fact, that "lexico-semantic  
phenomena have... received remarkably" lot of attention from European,  
Carpatian and Balkan areal linguistics since 1930-ies. The "Atlas  
linguarum Europae", "Pan-Carpatian linguistic atlas" ("Общекарпатский  
диалектологический атлас") and "Minor Balkan linguistic atlas" ("Малый  
диалектологический атлас балканских языков") can be consulted for data  
and research frameworks.

Best regards,
Prof. Dr. Andrey N. Sobolev



Цитирую Maria Koptjevskaja Tamm <tamm at ling.su.se>:

> 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>