21.4053, Calls: Historical Ling, Syntax/Japan

Thu Oct 14 14:51:17 UTC 2010

LINGUIST List: Vol-21-4053. Thu Oct 14 2010. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 21.4053, Calls: Historical Ling, Syntax/Japan

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1)
Date: 12-Oct-2010
From: Jóhanna Barðdal [johanna.barddal at uib.no]
Subject: Reconstructing Syntax

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2010 10:48:43
From: Jóhanna Barðdal [johanna.barddal at uib.no]
Subject: Reconstructing Syntax

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Full Title: Reconstructing Syntax 

Date: 25-Jul-2011 - 30-Jul-2011
Location: Osaka, Japan 
Contact Person: Jóhanna Barðdal
Meeting Email: johanna.barddal at uib.no
Web Site: http://org.uib.no/iecastp/IECASTP/Workshop8.htm 

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Syntax 

Call Deadline: 15-Nov-2010 

Meeting Description:

Historical-comparative reconstruction has traditionally been focused on 
lexical, morphological and phonological comparisons, while syntactic 
reconstruction has either been systematically left unattended, regarded as 
fruitless or uninteresting, or even rebuked (cf. Watkins 1964, Jeffers 1976, 
Lightfoot 1979, 2006, Harrison 2003, Pires & Thomason 2008, Mengden 
2008, inter alia). The reason for this is that syntactic structures have been 
regarded as fundamentally different from, for instance, morphological 
structures, in several respects. That is, syntactic structures are larger and 
more complex units than morphological units. Semantically they have not 
been regarded on par with morphological units either, in that their meaning 
is regarded as the sum of the meaning of the lexical parts that instantiate 
them, and because of this semantic compositionality they have not been 
regarded as being arbitrary form-meaning correspondences like words. It 
has also been argued in the literature that syntactic structures are not 
inherited in the same way as the vocabulary (Lightfoot 1979 and later work), 
that there is no cognate material to compare when comparing sentences 
across daughter languages (Jeffers 1976), that there is no regularity of 
syntactic change, as opposed to the regularity of phonological change 
(Lightfoot 2002, Pirus & Thomason 2008), and that there is no arbitrariness 
found in syntax (Harrison 2003), all of which render syntactic reconstruction 
fundamentally different from phonological reconstruction.

Recent work within historical-comparative syntax takes issue with this view 
of syntactic reconstruction (Kikusawa 2003, Harris 2008, Bauern 2008, 
Barðdal & Eythórsson 2009, Barðdal 2010), arguing that the concepts of 
'cognate status,' 'arbitrariness' and 'regularity' are non-problematic for 
syntactic reconstruction. This is so, first, because cognates are also found 
in syntax (Kikusawa 2003, Barðdal & Eythórsson 2009, Barðdal 2010). 
Second, because the arbitrariness requirement is simply not needed in 
syntax, as its role is first and foremost to aid in deciding on genetic 
relatedness, which is usually not an issue when doing syntactic 
reconstruction (Harrison 2003, Barðdal & Eythórsson 2009, Barðdal 2010). 
And, third, because a) the sound laws are only regular by definition 
(Hoenigswald 1987), and b) the sound laws are basically stand-ins for a 
similarity metric when deciding upon cognate status (Harrison 2003).

It has also recently been claimed (cf. Barðdal & Eythórsson 2009, Barðdal 
2010) that Construction Grammar is more easily extendible to syntactic 
reconstruction than other frameworks, due to the basic status of form-
meaning/function pairings in that framework. This creates a natural leap 
from synchronic form-meaning pairings to historical reconstruction, based 
on form-meaning pairings.

Please see http://org.uib.no/iecastp/IECASTP/Workshop8.htm for complete 
list of references. 

2nd Call For Papers

This ICHL workshop aims at accommodating contributions including, but
not limited to, the following:

- The fundamental issues of reconstruction in general and syntactic 
reconstruction in particular
- Individual case studies of syntactic reconstruction from different languages 
and language families
- A comparison of how different theoretical frameworks may contribute to 
syntactic reconstruction

Please send your abstracts of 500 words or less to Jóhanna Barðdal
(Johanna.Barddal at uib.no), no later than November 15th 2010, preferably 
in pdf-format. A response on abstracts will be sent out on December 15th 
2010.

References:

Barðdal, Jóhanna. 2010. Construction-Based Historical-Comparative 
Reconstruction. To appear in Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar. 
Eds. Graeme Trousdale & Thomas Hoffmann. Oxford: Oxford University 
Press.

Barðdal, Jóhanna & Thórhallur Eythórsson. 2009. Reconstructing Syntax: 
Construction Grammar and the Comparative Method. To appear in Sign-
Based Construction Grammar. Eds. Hans C. Boas & Ivan A. Sag. Stanford: 
CSLI Publications.

Bowern, Claire. 2008. Syntactic Change and Syntactic Reconstruction in 
Generative Grammar. In Principles of Syntactic Reconstruction. Eds. Gisela 
Ferraresi & Maria Goldbach, 187-216. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Ferraresi, Gisella & Maria Goldbach (eds.). 2008. Principles of Syntactic 
Reconstruction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Harris, Alice C. 2008. Reconstruction in Syntax: Reconstruction of Patterns. 
In Principles of Syntactic Reconstruction. Eds. Gisela Ferraresi & Maria 
Goldbach, 73-95. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Harrison, S. P. 2003. On the Limits of the Comparative Method. In The 
Handbook of Historical Linguistics, eds. B. D. Joseph & R. D. Janda, 343-
368. Oxford: Blackwell.

Hoenigswald, H. M. 1987. The Annus Mirabilis 1876 and Posterity. 
Transactions of the Philological Society 76(1): 17-35.

Jeffers, Robert J. 1976. Syntactic Change and Syntactic Reconstruction. In 
Current Progress in Historical Linguistics: Proceedings of the Second 
International Conference on Historical Linguistics, ed. William M. Christie, 
Jr., 1-15, Amsterdam.

Kikusawa, Ritsuko. 2003. The Development of Some Indonesian Pronominal 
Systems. Historical Linguistics 2001: Selected Papers from the 15th 
International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Melbourne, 13-17 August 
2001, eds. Barry J. Blake, Kate Burridge & Jo Taylor, 237-268. Amsterdam: 
John Benjamins.

Lightfoot, David. 1979. Principles of Diachronic Syntax. Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press.

Lightfoot, David W. 2002. Myths and the Prehistory of Grammars. Journal of 
Linguistics 38(1): 113-136.

Lightfoot, David. 2006. How New Languages Emerge. Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press.

Mengden, Ferdinand von. 2008. Reconstructing Complex Structures: A 
Typological Perspective. In Principles of Syntactic Reconstruction. Eds. 
Gisela Ferraresi & Maria Goldbach, 97-119. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Pires, Acrisio & Sarah G. Thomason. 2008. How Much Syntactic 
Reconstruction is Possible? In Principles of Syntactic Reconstruction. Eds. 
Gisela Ferraresi & Maria Goldbach, 27-72. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Watkins, Calvert. 1964. Preliminaries to the reconstruction of Indo-European 
sentence structure. In Proceedings of the IX International Congress of 
Linguists, ed. H.G. Lunt, 1035-1045. The Hague: Mouton.

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