[Lingtyp] Workshop at ALT2026: Incorporating the Spoken Signal Into Grammatical Typology

[Laura Becker]

Dear colleagues,

Naomi Peck and I are organizing a workshop on spoken typology at the 
next ALT in Lyon, July 2026. If you are working with spoken language 
data from a typological perspective, we'd be delighted for you to join 
our workshop! You can find the workshop description and the submission 
details below.

Best,
Laura (typing) and Naomi

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Workshop at ALT2026: Incorporating the Spoken Signal Into Grammatical 
Typology*
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Date: *01-Jul-2026 - 03-Jul-2026*
Location: *Lyon, France*
Meeting URL: https://alt-2026.sciencesconf.org/
Abstract Submission Info: 
https://alt-2026.sciencesconf.org/resource/page/id/2
Submission Deadline: *15-Oct-2025
*Convenors: Laura Becker (University of Freiburg) & Naomi Peck 
(University of Freiburg)
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*
*Incorporating the Spoken Signal Into Grammatical Typology

**The Written Bias in Typology*
Most languages are primarily spoken, with only a minority of languages 
or speaker communities developing a writing system. We can estimate that 
less than 10% of all languages spoken today have developed writing to 
the extent that they have a literary tradition, with the other 90% being 
exclusively spoken or written to a much lesser extent (Ong 1982: 7). 
Despite the primacy of the spoken mode for language, most work on 
grammar has relied upon the study of written representations, with 
typology being no exception. The information on grammatical structures 
needed for a typological study is usually extracted from transcribed 
examples in reference grammars or taken from a typological database such 
as WALS or Grambank, which are based on written resources of languages 
themselves. Even typological or cross-linguistic studies that use corpus 
data often have to rely on written records, given that most 
cross-linguistic corpus collections (such as the Universal Dependency 
treebanks) are based on compilations of written data.
*
Evidence for the Spoken Signal Affecting Grammar*
Despite the general reliance on written data, typologists have begun to 
seriously consider the impact of the spoken signal on grammar. Two 
notable long-term projects, MultiCAST (Haig & Schnell 2021) and DoReCo 
(Seifart et al. 2024), have compiled annotated and time-aligned 
crosslinguistic spontaneous speech corpora, providing invaluable 
resources for typological corpus studies that consider phonetic and 
prosodic information for grammatical analysis.
Several typological studies have investigated phonetic properties in 
relation to grammar with spontaneous speech data from typologically 
distinct languages. A number of studies explored how phone duration 
helps to segment the continuous speech signal. Seifart et al. (2021) 
show that words are systematically lengthened in utterance-final 
positions across languages. Similarly, Blum et al. (2024) find that 
consonant lengthening marks the beginning of words. Furthermore, we have 
direct evidence for grammatical systems being sensitive to durational 
effects. Seifart et al. (2018) show that nouns slow down speech compared 
to verbs, and Becker (submitted) confirms that high-frequency 
grammatical markers are phonetically shortened compared to 
phonologically comparable but less frequent markers in the world’s 
languages.
Similarly, we have evidence that prosody interacts with grammatical 
structure, especially when it comes to prosodic boundaries and 
intonation units. For instance, Mettouchi (2018) argues that prosodic 
integration is key to understanding grammatical relations in Kabyle 
(Afro-Asiatic). More broadly, Himmelmann (2014, 2022) argues that 
prosodic boundaries constrain how separate linguistic elements can 
coalesce phonologically and become grammatical units. This is supported 
by Peck & Becker (2024), who revealed complex interactions between 
syntactic boundaries and silent pauses. Similarly, Reinöhl & Casaretto 
(2018) use evidence from prosodic unithood in historical poems to 
explain the absence of potential grammaticalization processes in Modern 
Indo-Aryan languages.
*
Aim of the Workshop*
In this workshop, our aim is to bring together typologists who explore 
how the unique properties associated with the spoken signal are related 
to grammatical structures across languages. Our objective is to gain a 
better understanding of how phonetic and prosodic properties interact 
with other levels of grammatical structures, how they can affect 
language change and grammaticalization, and what methods we have and 
need to study the effect of the spoken signal on grammar from a 
typological perspective.
*
Topics of the Workshop*
Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
- empirical investigations of spoken language phenomena in relation to 
grammar (crosslinguistic studies, single language studies, both 
experimental or corpus-based)
- explorations of the interaction of suprasegmental properties (e.g. 
tone, stress, pitch) and spoken language processes (e.g. pausing, 
durational modulation) with grammar
- explanations for grammatical phenomena which rely on properties of the 
spoken signal
- methodological reflections on how we can incorporate properties of the 
spoken signal in synchronic and/or diachronic studies
- methodological investigations on how our practices of writing spoken 
data influence typological analyses

Submissions to the workshop should be sent through via the open call for 
papers for ALT 2026. Please make sure that you include the workshop 
title as part of your abstract underneath your title if you wish your 
talk to be part of the workshop. Feel free to get in touch with the 
convenors if you wish to check whether your contribution will fit in 
with the theme of the workshop.
*
References*
Blum, Frederic, Ludger Paschen, Robert Forkel, Susanne Fuchs & Frank 
Seifart. 2024. Consonant lengthening marks the beginning of words across 
a diverse sample of languages. Nature Human Behaviour. 1–12.
Haig, Geoffrey & Stefan Schnell. 2021. Multi-CAST: Multilingual corpus 
of annotated spoken texts.
Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 2014. Asymmetries in the prosodic phrasing of 
function words: Another look at the suffixing preference. Language 
90(4). 927–960.
Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 2022. Prosodic phrasing and the emergence of 
phrase structure. Linguistics 60(3). 715–743.
Mettouchi, Amina. 2018. The interaction of state, prosody and linear 
order in Kabyle (Berber): Grammatical relations and information 
structure. In Mauro Tosco (ed.), Afro-Asiatic: Data and perspectives, 
261–285. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Ong, Walter J. 1982. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the 
Word. New York: Methuen.
Peck, Naomi & Laura Becker. 2024. Syntactic Pausing? Re-examining the 
associations in spontaneous speech data. Linguistics Vanguard 10(1). 
223–237.
Reinöhl, Uta & Antje Casaretto. 2018. When grammaticalization does NOT 
occur: Prosody-syntax mismatches in Indo-Aryan. Diachronica 35(2). 238–276.
Seifart, Frank, Ludger Paschen & Matthew Stave (eds.). 2024. Language 
Documentation Reference Corpus (DoReCo) 2.0. Lyon.
Seifart, Frank, Jan Strunk, Swintha Danielsen, Iren Hartmann, Brigitte 
Pakendorf, Søren Wichmann, Alena Witzlack-Makarevich, Nikolaus P. 
Himmelmann & Balthasar Bickel. 2021. The extent and degree of 
utterance-final word lengthening in spontaneous speech from 10 
languages. Linguistics Vanguard 7(1). 20190063.
Seifart, Frank, Jan Strunk, Swintha Danielsen, Iren Hartmann, Brigitte 
Pakendorf, Søren Wichmann, Alena Witzlack-Makarevich, Nivja H. de Jong & 
Balthasar Bickel. 2018. Nouns slow down speech across structurally and 
culturally diverse languages. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences 115(22). 5720–5725.
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