[Lingtyp] SLE2024 workshop: Phonological databases

[Ian Joo]

Dear typologists,

I would like to arrange a workshop dedicated to phonological databases (such as Phoible or UPSID) at the 57th annual meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, to be held in Helsinki in August 2024.
Please find below the initial call for mini-abstracts (<300 words), also attached as a pdf file. At least eight abstracts are needed for the workshop to take place.

Phonological databases

Convener: Ian Joo
Nagoya University of Commerce and Business
October 28, 2023

Phonological typology in the 21st century is endowed with an increasing number of phonolgo-
ical databases, containing various types of phonological information, such as phonemic inventories
(Maddieson 2009; Moran and McCloy 2019), phonotactic constraints (Mielke 2008; Maddieson,
Flavier, et al. 2013; Nikolaev 2018; Joo and Hsu 2023), loan segments (Grossman et al. 2020), and
ancient sounds (Moran, Grossman, et al. 2021). These databases open door for a myriad of data-
driven approaches on phonological universals and areal patterns. Phonological typologists may
benefit from a methodological discussion on how to profit from the possibilities of such large data.
To host such a discussion in a tentative workshop at the 57th annual meeting of the Societas
Linguistica Europæa, abstracts related to the following questions and other related topics are called
for:

• How to use the databases? The phonological databases can be used for diverse purposes,
such as detecting the areal distribution of consonant inventories (Nikolaev 2019) or investi-
gating the correlation between climate and physiology (Maddieson and Benedict 2023). With
our creativity, the available databases can be exploited yet further for endless research possi-
bilities, especially when we combine the phonological databases with the non-phonological
ones, such as Grambank (Skirgård et al. 2023).

• How can the databases complement each other? Each database, by the nature of its de-
sign and the first-hand data it relies on, is limited in one way or another. Anderson et al.
(2023) have shown that the descriptions of the same sample of lects are alarmingly inconsis-
tent across different databases. Employing multiple databases, therefore, can be the desired
methodology in order to prevent a database becoming a data bias. How, then, can we extract
cross-compatible data from differently designed databases, with different lect classifications,
phonological transcriptions, and theoretical backgrounds?

• What’s next? What are some phonological (or phonetic) properties of human language
that are not covered by the databases published so far? For example, no currently avail-
able database contains extensive data on prosody, vowel formant frequencies, sign language
phonology, morphohphonological rules, and many other important phonetic-phonological
variables. If you are working on a database that fills in one of these gaps, then this venue can
be the right place to present your ongoing research and receive feedback from other linguists
working on previous databases.

Please send your abstract (up to 300 words excluding references, 12pt Times New Roman, 2.5cm
margin, pdf format) on one of these or other related topics to ian_joo at nucba.ac.jp by 19 Novem-
ber 2023. If I receive eight or more abstracts, I will send a workshop proposal to the Chair of SLE
workshops for their approval.

References

Anderson, Cormac, Tiago Tresoldi, Simon J. Greenhill, Robert Forkel, Russell D Gray, and Johann-
Mattis List (2023). “Measuring variation in phoneme inventories”. In: Journal of Language
Evolution (accepted).
Grossman, Eitan, Elad Eisen, Dmitry Nikolaev, and Steven Moran (2020). “SegBo: A database of
borrowed Sounds in the world’s languages”. In: Proceedings of the 12th language resources and
evaluation conference. European Language Resources Association, pp. 5316–5322.
Joo, Ian and Yu-Yin Hsu (2023). “Phonotacticon: a cross-linguistic phonotactic database”. In: Lan-
guage Resources and Evaluation (under review). DOI: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-3269302/v1.
Maddieson, Ian (2009). Patterns of sounds. Cambridge University Press.
Maddieson, Ian and Karl Benedict (2023). “Demonstrating environmental impacts on the sound
structure of languages: challenges and solutions”. In: Frontiers in Psychology 14.
Maddieson, Ian, Sébastien Flavier, Egidio Marsico, Christophe Coupé, and François Pellegrino
(2013). “LAPSyd: Lyon-Albuquerque phonological systems database”. In: Interspeech 2013.
International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). DOI: 10 . 21437 / interspeech .
2013-660.
Mielke, Jeff (2008). The emergence of distinctive features. Oxford University Press.
Moran, Steven, Eitan Grossman, and Annemarie Verkerk (2021). “Investigating diachronic trends
in phonological inventories using BDPROTO”. In: Language Resources and Evaluation 55.1,
pp. 79–103.
Moran, Steven and Daniel McCloy (2019). PHOIBLE 2.0. Max Planck Institute for the Science of
Human History. URL: https://phoible.org/.
Nikolaev, Dmitry (2018). “The Database of Eurasian Phonological Inventories: A research tool for
distributional phonological typology”. In: Linguistics Vanguard 4.1.
— (2019). “Areal dependency of consonant inventories”. In: Language Dynamics and Change 9.1,
pp. 104–126.
Skirgård, Hedvig et al. (2023). “Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on
linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss”. In: Science Advances 9.16,
eadg6175. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adg6175



From Japan,
Ian

- - - - -
JOO, IAN 朱易安
Lecturer 助教
Faculty of International Studies 国際学部
Nagoya University of Commerce and Business 名古屋商科大学
Nisshin, Aichi, Japan 愛知県日進市
https://ianjoo.github.io
- - - - -

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20231028/0db4e76b/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: SLE2024workshop.pdf
Type: application/pdf
Size: 32060 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20231028/0db4e76b/attachment.pdf>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20231028/0db4e76b/attachment-0001.htm>