[Lingtyp] Call for papers ALT 2022 Workshop: Situating constituency within typological research

[Jeff Good]

ALT 2022 Workshop
Situating constituency within typological research
Organizers by Jeff Good and Adam Tallman

Studies of constituency normally focus on the analysis of a single language and center around issues such as how robust the distinction is between words and phrases in a language or whether there is evidence for significant hierarchical structure within its clauses. However, despite its centrality to many theoretical approaches to the study of grammar, constituency has yet to be considered systematically from a typological perspective. On the methodological side, key concerns center around the fact that so-called constituency “tests” do not necessarily converge on a single constituency analysis for a given structure. Some analysts (e.g., Croft 2001) have taken this to suggest that attempts to provide constituency analyses for linguistic elements should be abandoned, while others view the issue in terms of making sure that only the “right” constituency tests are employed (e.g., Carnie 2008). Related issues have emerged in the context of phonological constituency. Typological studies have argued that the attested diversity of phonological domains is inconsistent with theoretical approaches to phonological constituency such as those associated with the prosodic hierarchy (e.g. Bickel et al. 2009). Other researchers have responded to this by pointing out that a more flexible model of phonological constituency might be able to handle this diversity (Bennet & Elfner 2018).

On the theoretical side, an important concern is whether there will always be a clear-cut distinction between morphosyntactic constituency and phonological constituency in every language, without a need to posit any other kinds of constituency (Tallman 2021). On the typological side, many significant questions remain open, such as whether all languages show apparent clustering of domains over which morphosyntactic and phonological generalizations apply in a way that is suggestive of the presence of constituency, whether such clusters pattern in a way that is consistent with commonly employed notions such as word and phrase (or more theoretically oriented analogs such as X⁰ and XP), and what the global distribution is of different kinds of phenomena typically associated with constituency. In addition, there is the question of how patterns of constituency emerge historically and whether a diachronic approach to constituency may be more effective at accounting for observed typological generalizations than a synchronic one.

The goal of this workshop is to launch a discussion of constituency from a typological perspective, especially in light of recent advances in quantitative approaches to typology and the study of grammar. Questions to be considered include what features of theoretical approaches to constituency can be usefully adapted for typological investigation, what kinds of coding and data analysis strategies are needed to study constituency typologically, and how the tools of typology can be used to shed light on traditional distinctions, such as the contrast between word and phrase, and determine the extent to which such categories can be considered cross-linguistically valid. An additional consideration will be the extent to which observed typological patterns of constituency can be linked to patterns of language use. Contributions exploring concerns emanating from formal linguistic theories, such as so-called bracketing paradoxes or discontinuous constituents, from a typological perspective, are also welcome. While the focus of the workshop is the typology of constituency, papers focusing on specific languages will also be considered as long as they situate their results with respect to broader typological concerns.

Possible talks topics may include, but are not limited to:

  *   Examinations of how to apply constituency tests proposed in the literature to typologically diverse languages
  *   Comparisons of different constituency tests with attempts to assess how useful and reliable they are
  *   Discussions of how the results of constituency tests can be coded in a way which allows for rigorous typological analysis
  *   Consideration of the word/phrase distinction in morphosyntax and phonology and what kinds of data and methods are required to resolve debates around the validity of the distinction
  *   The role of templates, and similar kinds of restrictions on linear realization, in understanding the typology of constituency
  *   Studies of constituent structure in specific languages situated with respect to larger typological questions of constituency

References
Bennett, R., & Elfner, E. (2019). The Syntax-Prosody Interface. Annual Review of Linguistics, 5, 151-171.

Bickel, B., Hildebrandt, K. A., & Schiering, R. (2009). The distribution of phonological word domains: A probabilistic typology. In J. Grijzenhout, & K. Baris (Eds.), Phonological Domains: Universals and Deviations (pp. 47–75). De Gruyter Mouton.

Carnie, A. (2000). On the definition of X0 and XP. Syntax, 3(2), 59–106.

Croft, W. (2001). Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tallman, A. J. (2021). Constituency and coincidence in Chácobo (Pano). Studies in Language, 45, 321–383.


Information on submitting an abstract can be found on the general ALT 2022 abstract submission page:
https://sites.google.com/view/alt2022/call-for-papers

Please make sure to put the workshop title, Situating constituency within typological research, at the top of your abstract.

Abstract submission deadline: 1 April 2022

For more information, please contact the organizers:
Jeff Good:  jcgood at buffalo.edu<mailto:jcgood at buffalo.edu>
Adam Tallman :  ajrtallman at utexas.edu<mailto:ajrtallman at utexas.edu>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20220202/3ddcaa2f/attachment.htm>