[Lingtyp] CfP Grammatical Relations in Spoken Language Corpora 2023

[Sonja Riesberg]

<https://grelspoc2023.sciencesconf.org> 	
GRelSpoC 2023: Grammatical Relations in Spoken Language Corpora 
<https://grelspoc2023.sciencesconf.org>
15-16 Jun 2023 Paris (France)

*Workshop: Grammatical relations in spoken language corpora*

15 – 16 June 2023, Paris (France)

Scholars with a broadly usage-oriented view on language share the idea 
that the linguistic structures encountered in human language systems 
arise from diachronic processes of language evolution that are in turn 
shaped by considerations of language processing, learning and usage (cf. 
e.g. Sinnemäki 2014 for an overview). Recent years have seen a steep 
rise in studies directly addressing issues of processing and 
learnability in relation to typological distributions of linguistic 
structures, e.g. in experimental studies from neuro- (Sauppe et al 2021; 
Bickel et al 2015) and psycholinguistics (Adamou 2017) as well as in 
artificial language learning experiments (Tal et al 2022; Mansfield et 
al 2022).

Corpus-based studies (of language usage by adult speakers) related to 
typological questions have a longer history within the functionalist 
tradition of linguistics associated with scholars like Wallace Chafe or 
Talmy Givón (and their associates and successors) as well as Zipf’s 
(1935) seminal work on frequency distributions and form-frequency 
correspondences. Larger-scale corpus studies of relevance for typology 
have examined in particular word order (Greenberg 1963; Dryer 1992; 
Futrell et al 2015, 2020; Levshina 2019) and marking asymmetries 
(Greenberg 1966; Levshina 2021; Haspelmath & Karjus 2014), taking 
efficiency as a core characteristic underlying language use as well as 
the design of human language systems (cf. Gibson et al 2019 for an 
overview). Yet, for the most part this work is based on corpora from 
larger languages (often with a literary tradition and official/standard 
status in at least one country), and largely on written corpora.

In this workshop we focus on the interrelation of grammatical relations 
as reflected in the structure of individual languages and their 
communicative underpinnings in discourse production, and we seek to 
bring together scholars with a primary focus on corpus-based work. We 
intend to broaden the perspective on the usage-oriented rationale behind 
specific structural aspects of grammatical relation systems. We hence 
seek corpus-based research that includes not only classic 
discourse-functional factors like topic marking and topic continuity 
(Givón 1976, 1983; Shibatani 1991) or the converse function of reference 
establishment (DuBois 1987; cf. Evans & Levinson 2009:440), but also 
structural (e.g. the interplay of person agreement and pronoun use, cf. 
Taraldsen 1980; Rosenkvist 2009, 2018; Schnell & Barth 2020), cultural, 
and social factors (e.g. use of ergative constructions in relation to 
the social role of speakers in Samoan, cf. Duranti 1994).

We furthermore restrict the purview of this workshop to spoken-language 
discourse as we see spoken language usage not only as the primary 
seedbed for the emergence of grammatical relations generally speaking 
(by way of its primordial form of usage of human languages) and 
specifically as containing those interactions between prosodic, 
syntactic and morphological structure that lie behind processes of 
univerbation and morphologization (Lehmann 2015 [1982]; Bybee 1985).

*Invited speakers:*

Linda Konnerth (University of Bern)

Henrik Rosenkvist (University of Gothenburg)

*Call for papers:*

We invite contributions of corpus-based research that are primarily 
based on spoken-language production data, and preferably on data from 
hitherto understudied languages. Possible topics include, but are not 
restricted to:

  * Conditioning of differential case marking/flagging, indexing of core
    argument functions
  * Alignment splits in regards to core argument encoding, and its
    reflections in language use
  * Variation in word order
  * Structural factors impacting the use of specific structures in
    grammatical relations
  * Communicative functions of distinct structural features
  * Interplay of case, indexing and word order with prosodic chunking
    and intonation
  * Role of prosodic principles in linguistic unit formation in
    grammatical relations

*Abstracts* should be no longer than 700 words including examples, and 
in PDF format.

Abstract submission deadline: 15 February 2023

Notification of acceptance: 17 March 2023

*To submit an abstract*, go to https://grelspoc2023.sciencesconf.org/, 
create an account under “Login”. Once you have logged in, go to “My 
Submissions”, and follow the instructions.

Katharina Haude (Sedyl, CNRS)

Eva van Lier (University of Amsterdam)

Sonja Riesberg (LaCiTO, CNRS)

Stefan Schnell (University of Zurich)

grelspoc2023 at sciencesconf.org

*References*

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