19.1771, Calls: General Linguistics/Germany; Phonology/Netherlands

Tue Jun 3 15:38:07 UTC 2008

LINGUIST List: Vol-19-1771. Tue Jun 03 2008. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 19.1771, Calls: General Linguistics/Germany; Phonology/Netherlands

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1)
Date: 02-Jun-2008
From: Marco García García < zsm-trans at uni-koeln.de >
Subject: Workshop on Transitivity 

2)
Date: 02-Jun-2008
From: Marc van Oostendorp < Marc.van.Oostendorp at Meertens.KNAW.nl >
Subject: Workshop on Phonological Variation in Voicing

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 03 Jun 2008 11:34:43
From: Marco García García [zsm-trans at uni-koeln.de]
Subject: Workshop on Transitivity
E-mail this message to a friend:
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Full Title: Workshop on Transitivity 
Short Title: WS transitivity 

Date: 14-Nov-2008 - 15-Nov-2008
Location: Cologne, Germany 
Contact Person: Marco García García
Meeting Email: zsm-trans at uni-koeln.de

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 15-Jun-2008 

Meeting Description:

The center Sprachenvielfalt und Mehrsprachigkeit ('Language Diversity and
Multilingualism') at the University of Cologne organizes a Workhop on
Transitivity on November 14th - 15th. 

3rd and last Call for Papers

Confirmed Speakers:
Werner Abraham (Vienna)
Leila Behrens (Cologne)
Ina Bornkessel (Leipzig)
Daniel Jacob (Freiburg)
Beatrice Primus (Cologne)
Matthias Schlesewsky (Marburg)

The concept of 'transitivity' appears to be as central to the description of
natural language phenomena as it is elusive.

Traditionally, transitive structures have been conceived of as asymmetric
relations between distinguished participants. Accordingly, factors that would
seem relevant for the description of transitivity phenomena are limited prima
facie to (a) the nature of the expressed relation and/or (b) the individuating
properties of the participants that are related. Emphasizing the relational
level (a), the line of research instigated in Dowty (1991) seeks to derive the
distinction between agent and patient as well as their canonical grammatical
encoding from the relative prominence of the individuals at different levels of
predicate decomposition (causality, volitionality, movement etc.). 

Emphasizing the individual level (b), the tradition following Comrie (1979,
1989) seeks to derive transitivity effects like (differential) case marking from
the individuating properties (animacy, definiteness) of the participants that
stand in a primitive opposition between agent and patient. Heterogenous
approaches in the tradition of Hopper and Thompson (1980) postulate factors at
the individuating level (animacy, definiteness, countability) as well as the
relational level (kinesis, gradual affectedness, agentivity) in order to explain
transitivity phenomena, and furthermore rely on factors at the sentence and the
discourse level (mood and aspect, fore-/backgrounding). 
Workshop presentations should focus on complexes like the following: 

- New or neglected observations concerning correlations between the syntax and
semantics/pragmatics of (in)transitive structures 
- The identification of factors that are relevant for transitivity effects and
their independence of or dependence on each other (e.g., dative and/or
differential case marking) 
- The conditions for, and the effects of 'detransitivizing' grammatical
processes ((anti-)passive, middle, argument incorporation)
- Evidence for/against the 'prototransitivity' of allegedly intransitive
structures (cf. Hale and Keyser 1993) 
- Generalizations related to transitivity that lie outside the verbal domain, as
well as, more generally, the status of transitivity in the grammar 

Contributions addressing the differing expressions of transitivity across
languages or taking an otherwise crosslinguistic perspective are particularly
welcome. Talks can be given in German or English; we schedule an hour for each
contribution, including discussion. We will seek to partially reimburse younger
researchers.  

Please send an anonymous abstract with the subject line 'WS transitivity' to
zsm-trans at uni-koeln.de. The abstract should be maximally one page, pdf-format.
Please include your name(s) and affiliation(s) in the text body of the email. 

The deadline for abstract submission is June 15th. Notification of acceptance by
July 15th.

-------------------------Message 2 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 03 Jun 2008 11:34:51
From: Marc van Oostendorp [Marc.van.Oostendorp at Meertens.KNAW.nl]
Subject: Workshop on Phonological Variation in Voicing
E-mail this message to a friend:
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Full Title: Workshop on Phonological Variation in Voicing 

Date: 11-Sep-2008 - 12-Sep-2008
Location: Amsterdam, Leiden, Netherlands 
Contact Person: Marc van Oostendorp
Meeting Email: Marc.van.Oostendorp at Meertens.KNAW.nl

Linguistic Field(s): Phonology 

Call Deadline: 28-Jun-2007 

Meeting Description:

What is the place of devoicing and other voicing phenomena in phonological
theory? Which phenomena need to be accounted for by our theory? Which phenomena
CAN be understood by it? This will be the topic of a workshop at the Meertens
Instituut in Amsterdam on September 11, 2008, and the University of Leiden on
September 12, 2008. 

Call for Papers: Workshop on Phonological Variation in Voicing

For most phonologists, the process of Final Devoicing, which we can observe in
languages such as German, Dutch, Yiddish, Russian, Polish, Catalan and Turkish,
did not deserve a lot of attention. One would write a rule of approximately the
shape [-son] -> [-voice] / -- #/$, and declare the issue resolved.

However, recent years have seen a revived interest in phenomena surrounding
devoicing, for a variety of reasons. One of them are developments in the
formalism, like that of OT. For one thing, it appears much easier to view
devoicing as a rule than as the result of a constraint. There is no consensus
yet as to what the constraint should be in OT (e.g. a general constraint against
voicing *Voiced, dominated by a faithfulness constraint for onsets, a
conjunction of NoCoda with *Voiced, a positional markedness constraint, etc.)
and further, Final Devoicing is one of the most famous cases of the so-called
Too-Many-Solutions Problem: why would the relevant constraint always be
satisfied by deletion of the voicing feature?

Further, lots of empirical work has come out which does not fit very easily with
classical views of phonology (including most of OT). First, we find final
devoicing both in languages in which the relevant contrast is indeed [voice]
(such as Catalan), but also in languages in which it rather involves [spread
glottis] (like German), which raises the question what these phenomena have in
common from a phonological point of view. Secondly, there is a large body of
work showing that final devoicing in many cases is not neutralizing completely,
but that there are phonetic traces of voicing in the acoustic signal, and that
listeners to some extent can detect these traces at least in experimental
circumstances. Thirdly, it turns out that whether or not a given stem is subject
to final devoicing is to a large extent predictable given lexical statistics.

Finally, it has become clear over the years that devoicing interacts with many
other phonological processes in (varieties of) European languages, such as
voicing assimilation, but also lexical tone. It has been claimed as well that
certain dialects of French, for instance, have developed interesting
phonological phenomena as a result of contact with West-Germanic final devoicing
systems.

The workshop will end in a very big party. Participation (including the party)
is free. Invited speakers will be Harry van der Hulst (University of
Connecticut) and Ben Hermans (Meertens Instituut).

Please submit an abstract (2 pages max; does not need to be anonymous; pdf file)
to Marc.van.Oostendorp at Meertens.KNAW.nl. Deadline: June 28.

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