[Lingtyp] SLE 2025: Workshop: diachronic and typological perspectives on lability

[Tim Ongenae]

Dear colleagues,
Daria Chistiakova (University of Liège / KU Leuven), Leonid Kulikov (Ghent University / UCLouvain) and I (Ghent University) are organizing a workshop on diachronic and typological perspectives on transitivity and lability at the next annual meeting of the SLE in Bordeaux, France (August 2025). We hereby send you the Call for Papers for the workshop.
Kind regards,
On behalf of the organizers,
Tim Ongenae

Full Title: Transitivity and Labile Verbs in Typological and Diachronic Perspectives: Indo-European and Beyond
Date: 26-Aug-2025 - 29-Aug-2025
Location: Bordeaux, France
Contact Person: Tim Ongenae
Meeting Email: tim.ongenae at ugent.be<mailto:tim.ongenae at ugent.be>
Web Site: https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2025/workshop-proposals/
Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Historical Linguistics; Semantics; Syntax; Typology
Call Deadline: 10-Nov-2024
Meeting Description:
The aim of the workshop is to investigate the encoding of transitivity oppositions, with a special focus on lability and labile verbs over time. The term ‘labile’ refers to verbs or verbal forms which can show valency alternation with no formal change in the verb. Very often it is only employed in narrower sense, to denote the verbs which can be employed both transitively and intransitively, as in Eng. “The door opened” ~ “John opened the door” or “Mary drinks tea” ~ “Mary drinks”. While numerous works address synchronic syntax of transitivity and labile verbs in the languages of the world, the diachronic aspects of these phenomena are often neglected or underestimated in linguistic and typological research.
The recent decades are marked with a considerable progress in typological study of the encoding of transitivity oppositions in general (see Geniušienė 1989; Kittilä 2002; Naess 2007, among others) and the systems of labile verbs in particular, both in individual languages, such as English (e.g. Levin & Rappaport Hovav 2005; McMillion 2006) or French (Larjavaara 2000), and in a cross-linguistic perspective (Nichols et al. 2004; Letuchiy 2013). Impressive results are achieved in the synchronic study of the systems of the categories responsible for encoding transitivity oppositions, such as voice and other valency-changing categories: causative, anticausative, passive, reflexive, reciprocal etc. By now, we have at our disposal rich catalogues of the morphological, syntactic and semantic features of these categories in the languages of the world. Since the seminal work by Hopper & Thompson (1980), the concept of transitivity has played a major role in the study of these and related categories. Thanks to these studies, our understanding of transitivity phenomena has dramatically increased. Moreover, studies in basic valency orientation (cf. Nichols et al. 2004) have proposed a typological classification of languages based on their preferred patterns of encoding valency increase and valency reduction. In the last decades, lability has been studied in the context of other valency-related phenomena, such as morphosyntactic alignment (see Dixon 1994; Creissels 2014). However, much less attention was paid to the diachronic aspects of transitivity oppositions, in particular, to the evolution of labile verbs.
We invite proposals addressing topics related to transitivity and lability in synchronic and particularly in diachronic perspective within different methodological frameworks, in order to uncover and explain the paths and mechanisms of the emergence and disappearance of labile verbs as well as morphological and syntactic changes in the domain of encoding of transitivity oppositions in the languages of the world.
Call for Papers:
Possible topics to be addressed at the workshop include (but are not limited to):

  *   theoretical and descriptive aspects of labile verbs;
  *   correlation between lability and morphosyntactic alignment;
  *   the diachrony of labile verbs in individual languages and in a crosslinguistic perspective;
  *   lability replacing or being replaced by other valency-changing phenomena;
  *   types of lability (e.g. causative lability, reflexive lability, passive lability etc.) in synchronic and diachronic perspective;
  *   mechanisms of emergence and decline of labile verbs;
  *   syntactic constraints on lability;
  *   verbal classes where lability is common or rare;
  *   the role of language contact and other language-external factors in the development of lability;
  *   corpus-based approaches to the diachrony of lability.

We invite submission of abstracts up to 300 words (references not included). Please send your abstracts in Word and PDF format to the workshop organizers (Leonid.Kulikov at UGent.be<mailto:Leonid.Kulikov at UGent.be>; Tim.Ongenae at UGent.be<mailto:Tim.Ongenae at UGent.be>; dchistiakova at uliege.be<mailto:dchistiakova at uliege.be>) by November 10, 2024.


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