[Lingtyp] four conferences on creoles and contact languages and areal typology

Wed Jan 10 20:36:56 UTC 2024

News on creoles: five calls for papers, one call for peace

Here are some calls for papers and more news about creole studies.

(1)       POZNAN, sept. 8-14, deadline February 1: Section on Linguistic Diversity, Language Contact and Areal Typology. Focus on creoles.

(2)       Leiden Workshop on Creole Languages (WoCL), May 23 and 24 2024. Deadline Jan. 15, 2024

(3)       Annual Meeting of the Association of Portuguese and Spanish Lexified Creoles (ACBLPE), São Tomé. Deadline: 19-Jan-2024

(4)       Paris. CfP: Workshop at the LLcD Conference (Langues et langage à la croisée des disciplines), 9-11 September 2024 (Sorbonne Université, Paris). Deadline: January 2024.

(5)       Guyana, SPCL/SCL, 5-9 August 2024. Society for Caribbean Linguistics (SCL), in conjunction with SPCL

(6)       Guyana and historical creolistics on Lingoblog.dk/en

  1.  POZNAN, sept. 8-14, deadline February 1: Section on Linguistic Diversity, Language Contact and Areal Typology. Focus on creoles.

Once every five years, there is the International Congress of Linguists (ICL). The 21st International Congress of Linguists (ICL) will take 8–14 September 2024 in Poznań, Poland. The first took place in 1928 in The Hague, Netherlands. We would like to invite interested scholars to send an abstract for the Section on Linguistic Diversity, Language Contact and Areal Typology, taking place on September 9 and 10.

This section brings together ideas and opinions about contact-induced language change. Typological atlases such as the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS.info) and the Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures (APiCS-online.info) have triggered increased attention for areal phenomena in language contact and contact languages. The new GRAMBANK site (grambank.clld.org<https://grambank.clld.org/>) makes even more data available. Such databases enable researchers to map language influences across language borders. New computational techniques are available to work with large databases.

            In typical linguistic area, a range of common features can be identified (e.g. the Balkan, India, Central America) across language families, but even the most characteristic features rarely coincide with the boundaries of the defined area. Why is that?

Properties of language families can be studied around their borders in order to investigate contact phenomena. Languages located far away from the center of the family may both more conservative and more innovative around the boundaries, and one can wonder why. Some areal phenomena are found on both sides of geographical barriers such as mountain ranges, bodies of water and deserts.

            An increasing number of studies identify more properties that creole languages have in common, more than continuities from the lexifiers or influences from the supposed substrates. Explanations for the similarities range from continuity from undocumented dialects of the lexifier, cognitive unity of humans, general typological similarities of the substrate languages around the world to the presence of “scattered Sprachbund” areas even across oceans. If creoles indeed have more in common with each other than with other natural languages, why would that be the case?

            Does language contact increase or decrease diversity? Can we identify different contact phenomena in areas of widespread bilingualism compared to areas of massive language shift?

            For this section, we invite contributions relating to diversity, language contact and areal typology, including for contact languages pidgins, creoles and mixed languages.

Abstracts submission. The deadline for abstract submission is 1 February 2024. It will not be possible to add other abstracts after the deadline. The Easychair link for abstract submission is available on both websites https://ciplnet.com/news/call-for-papers-and-workshop-proposals/ and https://icl2024poznan.pl/?id=2.

  1.  Leiden Workshop on Creole Languages (WoCL), May 23 and 24 2024. Deadline Jan. 15, 2024

We are pleased to announce the Leiden Workshop on Creole Languages (WoCL), which will be held at Leiden University on May 22, 2024. Deadline:

This workshop aims to bring together researchers who share an interest in the study of creole languages. We invite abstracts that investigate empirical data from any field (syntax, semantics, phonology, morphology, sociolinguistics). Priority will be given to papers which adopt a comparative approach. This includes comparisons among creole languages, as well as comparisons of creoles with other languages, related or unrelated. The workshop will be followed by the Leiden/Bielefeld Workshop on Comparative Syntax (LeiBieCos), which takes place in at Leiden University on May 23 and 24. In case you are interested to submit to both workshops, you can find their call for papers here (https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/events/2024/05/leiden-bielefeld-workshop-on-comparative-syntax-leibiecos).

Each talk lasts 20 minutes and is followed by 10 minutes of discussion.

Keynote speaker: The keynote speaker is Marlyse Baptista (University of Pennsylvania).

Please send an anonymous abstract (maximally 1 as author and 1 as co-author). Your abstract should be written in English and be no longer than two pages, including references and examples, with margins of at least 2.5 cm (1 inch), font size 12, single spaced. The format should be pdf. Abstracts are to be submitted via EasyAbs (https://easyabs.linguistlist.org/conference/wocl).

  1.  Annual Meeting of the Association of Portuguese and Spanish Lexified Creoles (ACBLPE), São Tomé. Deadline: 19-Jan-2024

Meeting Description:

The Annual Meeting of the Association of Portuguese and Spanish Lexified Creoles (ACBLPE) will be held on the 1st to 3rd of July 2024, in the city of São Tomé, São Tomé and Príncipe, in partnership with the University of São Tomé and Príncipe (USTP) and the Portuguese Cultural Center (CCP), which will host the event. The meeting will be in person only.

Call for Papers:

We welcome proposals in the area of language contact involving Portuguese and/or Spanish in any part of the world, including proposals related to the varieties of Portuguese spoken in Africa, in particular in the field of education, as well as proposals related to the revitalization of minority creole languages. Accepted talks will have an estimated duration of 30 minutes.
Abstracts should be written in Portuguese, Spanish, French or English, with a limit of 500 words, excluding references and examples, and sent to acblpe at gmail.com<mailto:acblpe at gmail.com> in both Word and PDF, with the format: title – summary – (examples) – references. Do not include your name and affiliation in the abstract itself. The subject of the email should contain “Abstract ACBLPE 2024”; in the body of the email, include the following data: author(s), academic affiliation(s), email contact(s), title of the abstract.

  1.  Paris. CfP: Workshop at the LLcD Conference (Langues et langage à la croisée des disciplines), 9-11 September 2024 (Sorbonne Université, Paris). Deadline: January 2024.

Conference URL: https://llcd2024.sciencesconf.org/

Workshop title: Subordination in Creole languages

Workshop organizers:

Stefano Manfredi (SeDyL, UMR 8202, CNRS, IRD, INALCO)
Susanne Maria Michaelis (Leipzig University & MPI-EVA, Leipzig)
Sibylle Kriegel (Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS, LPL, Aix-en-Provence, France)
Nicolas Quint (LLACAN, UMR 8135, CNRS/EPHE/INALCO)

Workshop description:

While many studies have explored and compared the morphosyntactic and semantic aspects of subordination in various linguistic areas and language families (Frajzyngier 1996; Kortmann 1996; van der Auwera 1998; Caron 2008), research on subordinated clauses in Creole languages remains limited.

The conceptualization of subordinate clauses as semantically hierarchical structures (Van Valin & LaPolla 1997; Nordström 2010; Cristofaro 2003) entails the definition of other grammatical notions, such as ‘finiteness’, ‘dependency’, ‘embeddedness, ‘hypo-/parataxis’ and, more generally, raises the question of how we define ‘syntactic complexity’ cross-linguistically. Furthermore, the comparative validity of the previously mentioned notions varies according to the adoption of different theoretical frameworks (e.g., functional grammar vs. generative grammar) as well as to language-dependent factors (Comrie 2008, Haspelmath 2010).

This workshop aims at gathering researchers working on Creole languages with different lexifiers (English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Arabic) and featuring diverse substrate/adstrate languages (e.g. Niger-Congo, Oceanic, Nilo-Saharan) in order to contribute to the debate on the definition of semantic and morphosyntactic parameters for comparing subordinate clauses cross-linguistically. Indeed, because of the particular historical dynamics of their emergence and the role played by language contact in their linguistic development, Creole languages raise a number of questions related to the grammaticalization of adverbial, complement, and relative clauses as well as to the formal parameters to be used for defining subordinate clauses (e.g., presence/absence of subordinating devices, TAM marking, presence/absence of pronominal arguments). In this context, the increasing availability of corpus-driven descriptions (see Vieira Semedo 2021, Duzerol forth.) and linguistic databases (Manfredi and Quint forth.) of subordination constructions in Creole languages open new descriptive and comparative perspectives on this highly variable syntactic domain.

In the light of the above, submissions to the workshop may include in-depth case studies of the syntax of subordinate clauses in individual Creole languages as well as presentations with a more comparative focus. We welcome both synchronically and diachronically-oriented studies of subordinate clauses in Creole languages. More generally, the workshop seeks to answer a range of questions related to the following domains of research:

- Morphosyntactic comparison of subordinated clauses: How can we better compare the morphosyntactic encoding of adverbial, complement, and relative subordinating relations across Creole languages? Are ‘finiteness’ and ‘embeddedness’ valuable morphosyntactic notions for the comparison of subordination in Creole languages (cf. Mufwene and Dijkhoff 1989; Cristofaro 2003; Nikolaeva 2007)?

- Grammaticalization of subordinating devices (subordinators, complementizers, and relators): Do subordinating devices present shared grammaticalization paths across Creole languages? To what extent is the grammaticalization of subordinating devices in Creole languages affected by the semantics and typological profile of their substrate/adstrate/superstrate languages (cf. Michaelis and Haspelmath 2020) ? To what extent does the ‘overlay function’ of subordinators (cf. Kortmann 1997) affect their grammaticalization in Creole languages?

- Mood, modality, and subordination: What is the diachronic link between the grammatical expression of mood and modality and the morphosyntactic encoding of subordinating relations (cf. Frajzyngier 1996; Nordström 2010) in one or more Creole languages? How do Creole languages grammaticalize and convey equivalents of a subjunctive mood in subordinated clauses?

- Morphosyntactic variation of subordinated clauses: What are the main sociolinguistic variables producing morphosyntactic variation of subordinated clauses in one or more Creole Languages (cf. Deuber 2005 for Nigerian Pidgin)? What are the main grammatical factors producing language-dependent variation of subordinated clauses in one or more Creole Languages?

- Typological considerations: Do Creole languages typologically differ from non-creole languages in the domain of subordination (cf. Van der Auwera 1998; Bakker et al. 2011; McWhorter 2018)? To what extent does first/second language acquisition affect the grammaticalization of subordinated clauses in Creole languages (cf. Diessel 2004; Veenstra 2015)?

- Linguistic databases and corpora: How can we ensure cross-linguistic comparability of subordinated clauses while giving information about language-dependent syntactic variation by means of linguistic databases (cf. Michaelis et al. 2013; Manfredi and Quint forth.)? How can corpus-driven analyses of subordination contribute to the broader typological comparison of subordinate clauses?

Submission guidelines

We are inviting abstracts for 20-minute presentations (French or English) that address essential aspects of subordination in Creole languages, both from a descriptive and comparative perspective. To participate, please submit preliminary abstracts (300 words, in docx format, including your affiliation) to the workshop organizers by 20 January 2024, at one of the following email addresses: stefano.manfredi at cnrs.fr<mailto:stefano.manfredi at cnrs.fr> or susanne.<mailto:susanne.michaelis at uni-leipzig.de>michaelis<mailto:susanne.michaelis at uni-leipzig.de>@uni-leipzig.de<mailto:susanne.michaelis at uni-leipzig.de>.

This workshop proposal has not yet been accepted by the conference organizers. We will submit it together with your preliminary abstracts by the end of January 2024.

References

Bakker, P., A. Daval-Markussen, M. Parkvall and I. Plag. 2011. Creoles are typologically distinct from non-creoles. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 26: 5-42.
Caron, B. (ed.). 2008. Subordination, dépendance et parataxe dans les langues africaines. Louvain: Peeters.
Comrie, B. 2008. Subordination, coordination: Form, semantics, pragmatics. In: E. Vajda (ed.), Subordination and Coordination Strategies in North Asian Languages. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, pp. 1-16.
Cristofaro, S. 2003. Subordination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Deuber, D. 2005. Nigerian Pidgin in Lagos: Language contact, variation and change in an African urban setting.
Diessel, H. 2004. The Acquisition of Complex Sentences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Duzerol, M. forthcoming. La complémentation et la relativisation en martiniquais (créole, Martinique) : une étude de corpus [PhD dissertation]. Lyon: Université Louis Lumière.
Frajzyngier, Z. 1996. Grammaticalization of Complex Sentence : A Case Study in Chadic. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Hapelmath, M. 2010. Comparative Concepts and Descriptive Categories in Cross-Linguistic Studies. Language 86, pp. 663-687
Kortmann, B. 1996. Adverbial Subordination: A Typology and History of Adverbial Subordinators Based on European Languages. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Manfredi, S. and N. Quint (eds.), forth. SCrolL – The database of Subordination in Creole Languages. CNRS, HumaNum.
McWhorter, J. 2018. The Creole Debate. Cambridge University Press.
Michaelis, S. M., P. Maurer, M. Haspelmath and M. Huber (eds.) 2013. Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
Michaelis, S. M. and M. Haspelmath. 2020. Grammaticalization in creole languages: Accelerated functionalization and semantic imitation. In W. Bisang and A. Malchukov (eds.), Volume 2 Grammaticalization Scenarios from Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2020, pp. 1109-1128.
Mufwene, S. and M. Dijkhoff. 1989. On the so-called « infinitive » in Atlantic Creoles. Lingua 77
Nikolaeva, I. (ed.). 2007. Finiteness: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Noonan, M. 1985. Complementation. In: T. Shopen (ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Cambridge University Press, pp. 42-140.
Nordström, J. 2010. Modality and Subordinators. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
van der Auwera, J. (ed.) 1998. Adverbial Constructions in Languages of Europe. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Van Valin, R. and R. LaPolla 1997. Syntax: Structure, Meaning, and Function. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Veenstra, T. 2015. The development of subordination. In A. Trotzke and J. Bayer (eds.), Syntactic Complexity across Interfaces. Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 137-162.
Vieira Semedo, E. 2021. Frase complexa em cabo-verdiano (variedade de Santiago) : um estudo da integração entre cláusulas) [PhD dissertation]. Paris: INALCO.

  1.   Guyana, SPCL/SCL, 5-9 August 2024. Society for Caribbean Linguistics (SCL), in conjunction with SPCL

Society for Caribbean Linguistics Conference 2024.

Conferences of the SCL welcome and encourage the participation of scholars, students, educators, writers, and the general public. Sessions include presentations, workshops, colloquia, poster sessions, and plenary addresses. The conferences provide many informal and meaningful opportunities for linguistic discussion.

Conferences are held every two years, and have been held in all the UWI campus territories (Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago), as well as in Aruba, the Bahamas, Belize, Curaçao, Dominica, Guyana, St. Lucia, St. Maarten and Suriname.

Upcoming: SCL 25th Biennial Conference (Guyana),<https://www.scl-online.net/Conferences/2024/index.htm> 5-9 August, 2024, in collaboration with the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics

The SCL call can be found here:

https://www.scl-online.net/Conferences/index.htm

The SPCL Call for Papers will be out soon.

  1.   Guyana and historical creolistics on Lingoblog.dk/en

It has, unfortunately, become fashionable in different parts of the world to invade neighboring countries by military force. One of the most recent threats is the claim of Venezuela on large parts of its neighbor Guyana. Venezuela sees itself as a continuation of the Spanish colonial empire, this time desiring the black gold.

Here you can read two blog posts, based especially on the pioneering historical work of the eminent Guyana creolist Ian Robertson, on the presence of Dutch-lexifier creoles in the region, and the absence of any direct Spanish influence. Spread the word.

https://www.lingoblog.dk/en/the-role-of-extinct-languages-in-the-venezuela-guyana-conflict/

https://www.lingoblog.dk/en/can-we-linguists-prevent-a-war-how-can-linguistic-research-establish-whether-venezuela-could-have-some-kind-of-right-to-claim-parts-of-guyana/

(Lingoblog.dk regularly posts about creole languages and sign languages; creolists and linguists from the global south can subscribe for free (in fact everybody can…), then you get a message when there is a new post).

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