[Lingtyp] CfP: Dependency grammar for Typology

[Luigi Talamo]

Dear colleagues,
we (Annemarie Verkerk, Andy Dyer and I) are aiming to submit a workshop proposal for ALT 15, to be held at the Beijing Normal University, Zhuhai, China, from November 8-10, 2024. The title will be ‘Dependency grammar for typology’; more information is included below. Given your (potential) interest in this topic, we would like to ask you if you would be interested in participating in the workshop with a talk. If we receive enough positive replies, we will prepare a full workshop proposal, to be submitted before 20 November 2023.

Blurb
Large-scale multilingual corpora such as Universal Dependencies have enabled advances in quantitative methods in morphosyntactic typology, allowing a transition from binary or multivariate classifications of linguistic features to more nuanced, continuous representations.

This workshop aims to bring together typologists working using dependency-annotated corpora for quantitative typological research.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

   • Synchronic comparative studies on variation that can only be accessed using corpora, such as word order (Levshina 2019, Talamo & Verkerk 2022);
   • Comparative studies that employ such resources to uncover universal principles of grammar, including dependency length optimization (Futrell, Mahowald & Gibson 2015; Liu 2021, Jing et al. 2022), word order universals (Choi et al. 2021, Gerdes et al. 2021), memory-surprisal trade-off (Hahn, Degen & Futrell 2021);
   • Diachronic studies of language change, such as the evolution rate of word order in main and subordinate clauses (Jing et al. 2023) or word order change (Hahn & Xu 2022);
   • Theoretical challenges in annotation, such as the universality of syntactic labels, as well as of parts of speech, morpho-syntactic features, and tokenization (Croft et al. 2017, Osborne & Gerdes 2019, Sinnemäki and Haakana 2020, Hohn 2021);
   • Development of new resources, in particular with respect to low-resource languages, starting from different type of texts (corpora, fieldwork notes, existing treebanks, Wikipedia, grammars, etc.) (Zariquiey et al. 2022, Kahane et al. 2023);
   • Projects that employ such resources to go beyond sentence-level syntactic dependencies by developing additional layers of annotation for studying discourse and information structure, among other levels;
   • Robustness and statistical validity of typological quantitative measures on the basis of different theoretical approaches and annotation schema (Buljan 2023, Osborne & Gerdes 2019). 

References
Sinnemäki, Kaius, and Viljami Haakana. ‘Variation in Universal Dependencies Annotation: A Token-Based Typological Case Study on Adpossessive Constructions’. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2020), 158–67. Barcelona, 2020.

Croft, William, Dawn Nordquist, Katherine Looney, and Michael Regan. ‘Linguistic Typology Meets Universal Dependencies’. In Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT15), edited by Markus Dickinson, Jan Hajic, Sandra Kübler, and Adam Przepiórkowski, 63–75. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, 2017.

Zariquiey, Roberto, Claudia Alvarado, Ximena Echevarria, Luisa Gomez, Rosa Gonzales, Mariana Illescas, Sabina Oporto, Frederic Blum, Arturo Oncevay, and Javier Vera. ‘Building an Endangered Language Resource in the Classroom: Universal Dependencies for Kakataibo’. arXiv, 21 June 2022. http://arxiv.org/abs/2206.10343.

Kahane, Sylvain, Santiago Herrera, Bruno Guillaume, and Kim Gerdes. ‘Autogramm : développement simultané de treebanks et de grammaires à partir de corpus’ 2023

Hohn, Georg F K. ‘Towards a Consistent Annotation of Nominal Person in Universal Dependencies’. Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW, SyntaxFest 2021), 2021.

Best,
Luigi

Dr. Luigi Talamo - Post doc

Universität des Saarlandes
Language Science and Technology
Campus A2.2,  Dienstzimmer 1.18
66123 Saarbrücken



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