[Lingtyp] CfP: Diachronic and Typological Perspectives on Anticausativization (Università di Torino, November 9th 2023)

Tue Nov 22 12:15:26 UTC 2022

Dear colleagues,

apologies for cross-posting, please allow me to announce the call for paper
for the upcoming workshop *Diachronic and Typological Perspectives on
Anticausativization *(Università di Torino, November 9th 2023). Call and
link to the website can be found below.

All the best,
Guglielmo Inglese

*Workshop Website*
https://sites.google.com/view/diatypantc2023/home-page

*Diachronic and Typological Perspectives on Anticausativization*

The (anti)causative alternation is a transitivity alternation concerned
with how languages express externally caused (CAUSAL) vs. spontaneously
occurring (NONCAUSAL) events. Typologists have shown that languages resort
to three main coding patterns to express such alternations (see
Tubino-Blanco 2020):

(i) CAUSATIVE: the causal member is overtly marked, Turkish öl- ‘die’ vs.
öl-dür- ‘kill’
(ii) ANTICAUSATIVE: the noncausal member is marked, Italian scioglier-si
‘melt (intr.)’ vs. sciogliere ‘melt (tr.)’
(iii) EQUIPOLLENT: both members are equally marked, Yaqui (Uto-Aztecan)
bee-te ‘burn (intr.)’ vs. bee-ta ‘burn (tr.)’

Despite the structural parallelism, it has been pointed out that causative
and anticausative markers (AMs) show a cross-linguistically unbalanced
distribution. Not only are AMs typologically less frequent than causatives,
but it is also rare for AMs to outnumber causatives in the lexicon of
individual languages (Nichols et al. 2004). In fact, the very existence of
the anticausative pattern, in which the semantically simpler member of the
alternation receives a morphologically more complex marking, constitutes a
puzzle, as it violates the iconicity principle (Haspelmath 2016: 593).
Nevertheless AMs do exist, and, strikingly, they appear to be a relatively
stable linguistic trait over time (e.g., Wichmann 2015).
Within individual languages, the distribution of AMs is not random, as some
verbs trigger AMs more frequently than others. To explain these
distributions, scholars have resorted to either verb semantics or frequency
effects. Semantics-based accounts appeal to notions such as spontaneity
(Haspelmath 1987) and claim that verbs lexicalizing events less likely to
occur spontaneously are more likely to trigger AMs, because higher
cognitive markedness entails higher structural markedness (Haspelmath 1993:
106). Frequency-based approaches explain marking asymmetries as mirroring
frequency asymmetries, based on the assumption that higher usage frequency
items are more predictable and thus favor shorter coding (Haspelmath 2021).
This means that verbs that more routinely occur in noncausal contexts are
less likely to receive AMs (Haspelmath et al. 2014).
Overall, despite the wealth of (mostly synchronically oriented) existing
research, the fundamental question as to why anticausatives exist remains
open. To understand why anticausativization exists, one must explore how
AMs arise in the first place, at least along two lines: (i) what are the
historical sources of AMs across languages and (ii) how do AMs historically
spread through the verbal lexicon of individual languages. Concerning (i),
typological works mention only two such sources, reflexives and passives
(e.g., Zúñiga & Kittilä 2019: 233), but this seems reductive, as there is
evidence for alternative developments (Bahrt 2021; Inglese 2022).
Concerning (ii), even in languages with ample historical documentation, as
e.g., Romance languages, we still lack a detailed understanding of how AMs
spread across time and, in particular, whether the lexical spread of AMs
follows proposed generalizations on the distribution of AMs with particular
verb classes, such as the spontaneity scale proposed by Haspelmath (2016)
shown in (1).

(1) TRANSITIVE ‘cut’ > UNERGATIVE ‘talk’ > AUTOMATIC UNACCUSATIVE ‘melt’ >
COSTLY UNACCUSATIVE ‘break’ > AGENTFUL ‘be cut’

*Call for papers*

Taking stock of these premises, the goal of this workshop is to offer a
venue for scholars interested in typology and historical linguistics to
develop a new diachronically oriented approach to the study of AMs. The
workshop will be held at the *University of Torino* (Italy) on the *9th
November 2023, *and is organized within the project *Historical and
typological perspectives on anticausativization*, funded by the University
of Torino and carried out in collaboration with KU Leuven. We welcome
contribution addressing (among others) the following topics:

● description of anticausativization (including equipollent) patterns in
previously undescribed languages;
● sources and grammaticalization of AMs in individual languages/language
families;
● the role of contact and areal convergence in the emergence of AMs;
● detailed historical corpus studies on the distribution of AMs;
● lexical restrictions in the distribution of AMs with specific verb
classes and their historical motivation;
● cross-linguistic corpus-based analyses of the distribution of AMs, their
frequency and productivity;
● diachronic stability of AMs within individual languages and families;
● loss of AMs.

*Submission guidelines *
Abstracts should be maximum 1 page long (+ 1 page for data and references),
and should be submitted by *email* to guglielmo.inglese at unito.it by *31
March 2023*. Acceptance notifications will be sent no later than 30 April
2023. Please check the workshop’s website for further information.

*Invited Speaker*
Johanna Nichols (HSE & University of California, Berkeley)

*Scientific Committee*
Bert Cornillie, Lorenzo Ferrarotti, Eugenio Goria, Guglielmo Inglese,
Giulia Mazzola, Ellison Luk, Davide Ricca, Mario Squartini, Jean-Christophe
Verstraete

*References*
Bahrt, Nicklas N. 2021. Voice syncretism. Berlin: Language Science Press.
Haspelmath, Martin. 1987. Transitivity alternations of the anticausative
type. Köln: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft.
Haspelmath, Martin. 1993. More on the typology of the inchoative/causative
verb alternations. In Bernard Comrie & Maria Polinsky (eds.), Causatives
and Transitivity, 87–120. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Haspelmath, Martin. 2016. Universals of causative and anticausative verb
formation and the spontaneity scale. Lingua Posnaniensis 58(2). 33–63.
Haspelmath, Martin. 2021. Explaining grammatical coding asymmetries:
Form–frequency correspondences and predictability. Journal of Linguistics
57(3). 605–633.
Haspelmath, Martin, Andreea Calude, Michael Spagnol, Heiko Narrog & Eli̇f
Bamyaci. 2014. Coding causal–noncausal verb alternations: A form–frequency
correspondence explanation. Journal of Linguistics 50(3). 587–625.
Inglese, Guglielmo. 2022. Cross-linguistic sources of anticausative
markers. Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads.
Nichols, Johanna, David A. Peterson & Jonathan Barnes. 2004. Transitivizing
and detransitivizing languages. Linguistic Typology 8(2). 149–211.
Tubino-Blanco, Mercedes. 2020. Causative-Inchoative in Morphology. Oxford
Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wichmann, Søren. 2015. Diachronic stability and typology. In Claire Bowern
& Bethwyn Evans (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics,
212–224. London & New York: Routledge.
Zúñiga, Fernando & Seppo Kittilä. 2019. Grammatical Voice. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
-- 
Dr. Guglielmo Inglese
Assistant Professor in Linguistics (RTDb)
Department of Humanities
University of Torino

Personal website
<https://sites.google.com/view/guglielmoinglese/home-page?authuser=0>
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