[Lingtyp] SLE 2024 Workshop: Pathways to Insubordination

[Ezra la Roi]

Dear colleagues,

We would like to arrange a workshop on the pathways to insubordination at the next SLE meeting in Helsinki in 2024. As described in the CFP below, we invite language-specific contributions, as well as cross-linguistic or areal studies:

Pathways to insubordination

Convenors: Ezra la Roi (Ghent University), María Sol Sansiñena (University of Leuven), An Van linden (University of Liège)

Keywords: insubordination, subordination, mechanisms of change, corpus linguistics, clause patterns and clause linkage

Description
This workshop focuses on the diachrony of insubordination, a phenomenon defined by Evans (2007: 377) as “the conventionalized independent use of a formally subordinate clause”. An example is a clause introduced by the complementizer que (‘that’) that is used to express a wish in Spanish, as in (1).

Nati: Bueno, chicos, me voy a acostar.
Rafael: Chau, que      descans-e-s.
                      COMP rest-PRS.SBJV-2SG
‘Nati: OK, guys, I’m going to bed.
Rafael: Bye, have a good rest.’
[CREA Teatro, El hijo de la novia, Argentina, example from Sansiñena 2015]

Over the past two decades insubordination has witnessed an increase in scholarly attention (e.g. Verstraete et al. 2012; Brinton 2014; Narrog 2016; Gras & Sansiñena 2017; D’Hertefelt 2018, and the articles in Evans & Watanabe (2016) and Beijering et al. (2019)), mostly from a synchronic perspective, while the diachronic perspective has so far “received comparatively less attention” (Cristofaro 2016: 395), and few studies have been carried out on the basis of historical corpus data (see e.g. Gras & Estellés 2012; Van linden & Van de Velde 2014; la Roi 2021, 2022). This workshop seeks to investigate the developmental pathways leading to independent clauses that are structurally similar to subordinate ones, like the que-clause in (1). It has been argued that “patterns that are superficially identical on the level of contemporary languages, may turn out as the results of radically different diachronic processes” (Wiemer 2019: 157) and that insubordinate constructions “can emerge from a variety of sources via a variety of mechanisms” (Mithun 2019: 31; see also Cristofaro 2016), such as ellipsis of a main clause (Evans 2007), extension of dependency (Mithun 2008, 2016), dependency shift (D'Hertefelt & Verstraete 2014), hypoanalysis (Van linden & Van de Velde 2014), cooptation (Heine, Kaltenbock & Kuteva 2016), and clausal disengagement (Cristofaro 2016). The available evidence thus imposes the need to study the development of such clause structures on a case-by-case basis. Against this backdrop, this workshop seeks to look deeper into the diachrony of insubordinate constructions along multiple pathways of change.

Aims of the workshop
The workshop will bring together linguists working on insubordinate clause patterns, their sources and the mechanisms by which they developed, either on the basis of historical corpus data for languages with written records or based on first-hand data collected in the field for those languages that do not have historical data. We invite language-specific contributions, as well as cross-linguistic or areal studies. More specifically, the topics and questions to be addressed include, but are not limited to, the following:

-Considering the wide range of functions of insubordinate constructions, how can we relate them to their respective sources and developmental pathways?
-What are the methodological challenges in tracing the diachrony of insubordinate structures in historical data?
-What can interactional approaches to insubordination and the study of prosody contribute to diachronic hypotheses?
-In the absence of spoken data, what information on the diachrony of insubordination can be gleaned from dialogical text types? What proxies can be used for prosodic information?

Invited speakers: Marianne Mithun (University of California, Santa Barbara) and Björn Wiemer (Mainz University)

Discussant: Sonia Cristofaro (Sorbonne University)

Please send provisional abstracts of up to 300 words (excl. references) in PDF by 10 November 2023 to Ezra.laRoi at UGent.be<mailto:Ezra.laRoi at UGent.be>. If the workshop is approved, we ask authors to submit 500-word abstracts before 15 January 2024



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Dr. Ezra la Roi
https://ezralaroi.com/
Ghent University
Δialing<https://www.dialing.ugent.be/> – Diachronic and Diatopic Linguistics
GCLA<https://www.gcla.ugent.be/> – Ghent Centre for Late Antiquity

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