[Lingtyp] Call for Papers: Special Collection in Linguistics Vanguard

[Natalia Levshina]

Apologies for cross-posting!

*Call for Papers: Special Collection in Linguistics Vanguard, Corpus
Linguistics and Typology Areas*

You are invited to submit a short paper (3000-4000 words) on the theme of
“Efficiency in human languages: corpus evidence for universal principles”
by November 1, 2019.



Efficient communication involves minimization of communicative costs during
information transfer. These costs are related to articulation (e.g. the
word *dinosaur* is costlier than *frog*, and plural forms in many languages
are costlier than singular forms) and processing (e.g. long syntactic and
semantic dependencies are costlier than short ones). A famous example is
Zipf’s law of abbreviation, which has been explained as a manifestation of
the general principle of least effort. More recent studies discuss
efficient language patterns found in corpus data, using concepts from
information theory, such as surprisal and informativity.

The aim of this special issue is to present corpus evidence from diverse
languages which supports the idea of efficiency as a universal principle
determining the rational behavior of language users, which shapes language
structure in the long run.

Some of the core questions include:

•                    What are the specific predictions generated by the
principle of efficiency for different linguistic phenomena and how can we
falsify them?

•                    How do different manifestations of efficiency interact
with each other and with other communicative and cognitive pressures and
principles, such as analogy and learnability, and how do we distinguish
between them?

•                    What is the role of concepts and methods from
information theory that can be used to operationalize efficiency?

•                    Can we show how efficient choices of individual
language users become conventionalized, and by doing so, avoid the danger
of teleological explanation?

•                    Which role do extralinguistic factors (e.g. population
size) play in the development and retainment of efficient patterns in a
language?

•                    What kind of corpora should be used for testing
efficiency? How comparable must they be across languages, registers, and
formats?

We invite psycholinguists, functional and cognitive linguists, typologists,
discourse analysts and other experts working on different aspects of
efficiency to submit a short paper to the special issue.  Submissions are
due November 1 2019 and they should report quantitative corpus-based
studies that address manifestations of communicatively efficient behavior
in various domains (lexicon, phonology, morphosyntax, pragmatics, etc.).

Linguistics Vanguard is an online, multi-modal journal and authors are
encouraged to include interactive content, such as audio, video, software,
raw data, etc. Because the journal is online-only, special collections are
"virtual collections" linked by shared keywords. Details about the journal
can be found at www.degruyter.com/lingvan.

Authors (and journal subscribers) will have free access to the entire
special collection. There are no publication costs. All authors may post a
PDF on their personal website one year after publication.

Questions can be directed to the editors, Natalia Levshina (
natalevs at gmail.com) and Steven Moran (steven.moran at uzh.ch).

-- 
Natalia Levshina
postdoctoral researcher
Project "Grammatical Universals"
Leipzig University (IPF 141199)
Nikolaistraße 6-10
04109 Leipzig
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