[Lingtyp] CfP - Workshop on "Disentangling literacy effects on grammatical structures"

[Caterina Mauri]

Dear all,



We would like to submit a workshop proposal for the ALT 2026 conference (Lyon, France, July 1-3, 2026). Below you’ll find a first draft of the call, which we will use as the basis for the final proposal.



If anyone is interested in participating, we kindly ask you to send a title and, possibly, a short abstract (up to 300 words) to the following addresses by April 25:

Caterina Mauri: caterina.mauri at unibo.it<mailto:caterina.mauri at unibo.it>

Andrea Sansò: asanso at unisa.it<mailto:asanso at unisa.it>



Many thanks in advance!



Caterina, Andrea, Silvia e Ludovica

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Call for papers
Disentangling literacy effects on grammatical structures
Convenors: Caterina Mauri, Andrea Sansò, Silvia Ballarè, Ludovica Pannitto

As Linell (2005) argued, modern linguistics is deeply affected by a written language bias, a systematic tendency to generalize properties of written language as if they were neutral or universal features of language per se. This bias impacts grammatical theory, obscuring or downplaying features of spoken language—such as fragmentation, hesitations, repetitions, on-line syntax, and interactional structures—which are less likely to be captured in grammatical descriptions. Similarly, foundational work by Chafe and Mithun (Chafe & Tannen 1987; Mithun 1988) has highlighted key structural and functional differences between spoken and written discourse, noting that grammar itself may develop differently under the pressures of face-to-face communication versus planned, written production, and that specific grammatical structures such as conjunctions are often borrowed once a language with no literary tradition comes into contact with one with literary tradition.
While much is known about how other broad-scale factors such as speaker populations shape languages (e.g., Nichols 1992; Trudgill 2011; Sinnemäki & Di Garbo 2018), and despite widespread awareness of the written language bias, typological research still struggles to adequately model how literacy shapes grammar. This is partly because systematic information on literacy is available for only a minority of the world’s languages, and because phenomena underrepresented in written corpora or standard descriptions raise significant methodological challenges.  More fundamentally, however, the main difficulty lies in disentangling the effects of literacy from other co-occurring factors.
This workshop aims to advance the empirical and theoretical study of literacy’s impact on grammar by bringing together research that critically examines the written language bias and proposes new data, methods, or frameworks for including less-documented spoken features into typological comparison and addressing literacy from a cross-linguistic perspective.
We welcome abstracts dealing with the following issues:

  *   Theoretical reflections on the written language bias in typology and linguistic theory
  *   Methodological reflections on how to assess literacy within a speakers’ community, including multilingual ones
  *   Case studies on the impact of literacy on morphosyntax, discourse structure, or information packaging
  *   Cross-linguistic variation in grammatical structures that may be sensitive to literacy
  *   Comparative studies of literate vs. non-literate varieties within the same language
  *   Methodologies for assessing literacy levels across language samples
  *   Challenges and opportunities in using large-scale typological databases (e.g., WALS, Grambank) to investigate spoken language features
  *   Insights from discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, or interactional linguistics into cross-linguistic patterns of spoken grammar
  *   Historical or diachronic perspectives on how literacy influences grammatical change

References
Chafe, W., & Tannen, D. (1987). The Relation Between Written and Spoken Language. Annual Review of Anthropology, 16(Volume 16, 1987), 383–407. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.16.100187.002123
Linell, P. (2005). The Written Language Bias in Linguistics. Its Nature, Origins and Transformations. London: Routledge.
Mithun, M. (1988). The grammaticization of coordination. In J. Haiman & S. Thompson (Eds.), Clause combining in grammar and discourse (pp. 331–360). Benjamins.
Nichols, J. (1992). Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time. University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226580593.001.0001
Sinnemäki, K., & Garbo, F. D. (2018). Language Structures May Adapt to the Sociolinguistic Environment, but It Matters What and How You Count: A Typological Study of Verbal and Nominal Complexity. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 342569. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01141
Trudgill, Peter. 2011. Sociolinguistic typology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Prof.ssa Caterina Mauri

Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna. Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature e Culture moderne
Via Cartoleria 5, 40124, Bologna.
Homepage: https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/caterina.mauri

Editor-in-chief of Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads <https://typologyatcrossroads.unibo.it/>
Ongoing projects: KIParla Corpus of spoken Italian<https://kiparla.it/en/> || DiverSIta: Diversity in spoken Italian<https://site.unibo.it/divers-ita/en>





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