[Lingtyp] Valency and valency alternations within and across language boundaries - A workshop at ALT 15

Thu Oct 12 08:42:56 UTC 2023

Dear all,

we (Michail Daniel, Guglielmo Inglese, Chiara Zanchi and myself) are
planning to submit a workshop proposal to the next ALT 15in Zhuhai (Nov.
8-10, 2024 https://sites.google.com/view/alt2024).

We would like all interested participants to contact us by Nov 10.

Below is the workshop description, we look forward to reading from you!

Silvia

*Valency and valency alternations within and across language boundaries*

*Convenors *

Michael Daniel, <misha.daniel at gmail.com>

Collegium de Lyon / Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage, Université Lyon 2 /
CNRS.

East Caucasian languages

Domains of expertise / interest: East Caucasian languages, morphosyntax,
language contact, language variation and change

Guglielmo Inglese, guglielmo.inglese at unito.it

Università di Torino

Domains of expertise / interest: Indo-European languages, language change,
diachronic typology, verbal voice

Chiara Zanchi,  chiara.zanchi01 at unipv.it,

University of Pavia, Department of Humanities, Linguistic Section

Domains of expertise / interest: Indo-European languages, pragmatics of
ancient and modern languages, cognitive linguistics, language resource
construction

Silvia Luraghi, luraghi at unipv.it

University of Pavia, Department of Humanities, Linguistic Section

Domains of expertise / interest: historical linguistics, Indo-European
linguistics, language typology, morphosyntax.

*Workshop description*

Cross-linguistically, semantically similar verbs show similar patterns of
valency understood as morphosyntactic treatment of their arguments,
including argument realization across verb classes (e.g. Tsunoda 1985;
Levin & Rappaport Hovav 2005), voice phenomena (e.g. Zúñiga & Kittilä 2019;
Bahrt 2020), lability (Creissels 2014) and more in general valency
alternations (Dixon & Aikhenvald 2000); see also (Creissels forthc.) for a
survey of the domain as a whole. So far, research has been focused on the
range of cross-linguistic variation across languages of different
genealogical and areal affiliation, and on attempts to extract general
coding tendencies. This workshop will narrow the scale of the study of
valency to sociolinguistic variation and diachronic change within languages
(cf. Comrie 2006, Grünthal et al. 2021, Luraghi & Roma 2021, and across
their dialects and to the effects of language contact (Say 2018, Kozhanov &
Say, in prep.).

A landmark typological study has been the project “Valency classes in the
languages of the world” (Malchukov & Comrie 2015; published online as
Hartmann et al 2013; http://valpal.info). The core of this database
contains data for 80 verb meanings from 36 languages, thus allowing large
scale cross-linguistic comparison. The ValPaL database has proven a
fruitful source for typological studies (e.g. Haspelmath 2015, Aldai &
Wichmann 2018). As it only contains data from modern languages, the ValPaL
database does not allow research on language change. Techniques of data
elicitation used by contributors to create the database are often not
uniform, the data is based on the contributor’s native speaker intuition,
sometimes complemented by dictionaries or other reference works and less
frequently by corpora; in cases in which the contributor was not a native
speaker of the language, data was collected through questionnaires,
dictionaries and other existing secondary sources. In addition, the ValPal
data largely disregards intra-linguistic variation (Japanese is a partial
exception).

Far from being flaws specific to ValPaL, lack of cross-linguistic
diachronic data, virtually no attention to variation, and non-homogeneous
nature of the data resulting from different collection techniques are
important limitations that come up again and again in cross-linguistic
research on valency patterns and alternations. As one example, there are
similar issues with another resource for the cross-linguistic study of
argument structure such, the BivalTyp database (Say 2020).

To address these issues, and promote an integrated research program on
valency and valency alternations that encompasses not only cross-linguistic
but also  intra-linguistic variation and dynamics of language internal and
contact-induced change, in this workshop we would like to gather
contributions addressing the following open research questions:

●       *Valency patterns in corpora*: to what extent does the empirical
study of valency patterns in large-scale corpora contribute to our
understanding of how said patterns are distributed in real language usage?  Can
labile verbs be identified based on corpora? More generally, do the source
of data and elicitation techniques affect the findings concerning valency
alternations within and across languages?

●       *Valency patterns over time*: how does valency change over time? Do
certain verb classes tend to follow comparable pathways of change in
unrelated languages? Are specific coding patterns (e.g. non-canonical
subjects) or alternations (e.g. anticausative) more stable vs. prone to
change than others?

●       *Valency in language contact*: does language contact affect valency
patterns, and to what extent it may condition changes in the coding of
arguments and in valency alternations?

●       *Valency patterns and areal variation*: Can large-scale areal
patterns be detected in the distribution of valency patterns? Can one
observe effects of variation in the distribution of valency patterns across
distinct diatopic varieties of the same language?

●       *Sociolinguistic factors*: To what extent is the distribution of
individual valency patterns and alternations sensitive to extra-linguistic
factors, such as formal or colloquial register etc.? Do non-standard
varieties showcase distinct valency patterns as compared to the standard
language (and, if so, what should be the consequences of this for adjusting
methods of language sampling in the cross-linguistic study of valency)? Can
the degree of variation internal to standard language be compared to that
of cross-dialectal variation?

*References*

Aldai, Gontzal & Søren Wichmann. 2018. Statistical observations on
hierarchies of transitivity. *Folia Linguistica* 52(2). 249-281.

Bahrt, Nicklas N. 2021. *Voice syncretism*. Berlin: Language Science Press.

Bickel, Balthasar & Alena Witzlack-Makarevich (eds.). 2019. *Argument
Selectors. A new perspective on grammatical relations*. Amsterdam &
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Comrie, Bernard. 2006. Transitivity pairs, markedness, and diachronic
stability. Linguistics 44(2). P. 303-318.

Creissels, Denis. 2014. P-lability and radical P-alignment. Linguistics
2014; 52(4): 911 – 944.

Creissels, Denis. Forthcoming. *Transitivity, Valency, and Voice. *Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

Dixon, Robert, & A.Yu. Aikhenvald (eds.) 2000. Changing valency: Case
studies in transitivity. Cambridge University Press.

Grünthal, Riho, Heini Arjava, Jyri Lehtinen & Johanna Nichols. 2021. Basic
causative verb patterns in Uralic:Retention and renewal in grammar and
lexicon.

Hartmann, Iren, Martin Haspelmath & Bradley Taylor (eds.) 2013. *Valency
Patterns Leipzig*. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology.

Haspelmath, Martin. 2015. Transitivity prominence. In Andrej L. Malchukov &
Bernard Comrie (eds.), *Valency classes in the world’s languages, Vol. 1*,
131–147. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Kozhanov, Kirill, and Sergey Say. (in prep.) Genealogy vs. contact
configuration: argument encoding across Romani dialects in Europe

Levin, Beth & Malka Rappaport Hovav. 2005. *Argument realization*.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Luraghi, Silvia, and Elisa Roma. 2021. Valency and transitivity over time:
An introduction. Valency over Time: Diachronic Perspectives on Valency
Patterns and Valency Orientation.

Malchukov, Andrej L. & Bernard Comrie (eds.). Valency classes in the
world’s languages. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Say, Sergey. 2018. Valentnostnye klassy dvuxmestnyx predikatov:
teoretičeskij kontekst, zadači issledovanija i struktura sbornika. [Valency
classes of two place verbs: theoretical context, aims and structure of the
volume] In: Sergey Saj (ed). Valentnostnye klassy dvuxmestnyx predikatov v
raznostrukturnyx jazykax. Saint Petersburg: ILI RAN. Pp. 5–24.

Say, Sergey (ed.). 2020. *BivalTyp: Typological database of bivalent verbs
and their encoding frames*. St. Petersburg: Institute for Linguistic
Studies, RAS.

Tsunoda, Tasaku. 1985. Remarks on transitivity. *Journal of Linguistics*
21: 385-396.

Zúñiga, Fernando & Seppo Kittilä. 2019. *Grammatical voice*. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press*.*

Silvia Luraghi
Università di Pavia
Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici, Sezione di Linguistica
Strada Nuova 65
I-27100 Pavia
tel.: +39/0382/984685
Web page personale: https://studiumanistici.unipv.it/?pagina=docenti&id=68
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