21.4229, Calls: Historical Linguistics, Syntax/Spain

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LINGUIST List: Vol-21-4229. Sun Oct 24 2010. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 21.4229, Calls: Historical Linguistics, Syntax/Spain

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1)
Date: 22-Oct-2010
From: Alena Witzlack-Makarevich [witzlack at uni-leipzig.de]
Subject: Referential Hierarchies in Alignment Typology
 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2010 16:27:38
From: Alena Witzlack-Makarevich [witzlack at uni-leipzig.de]
Subject: Referential Hierarchies in Alignment Typology

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Full Title: Referential Hierarchies in Alignment Typology 

Date: 08-Sep-2011 - 11-Sep-2011
Location: Logroño (La Rioja), Spain 
Contact Person: Alena Witzlack-Makarevich
Meeting Email: witzlack at uni-leipzig.de

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Syntax; Typology 

Call Deadline: 11-Nov-2010 

Meeting Description:

Within the framework of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica 
Europaea to be held at the Universidad de La Rioja (Logroño, Spain), 8-11 
September 2011, we would like to propose a workshop on Referential 
Hierarchies in Alignment Typology

Convenors
Balthasar Bickel (University of Leipzig)
Anna Siewierska (Lancaster University)
Alena Witzlack-Makarevich (University of Leipzig) 

Since the first comprehensive descriptions of languages with ergative 
alignment patterns in the 70s (Dixon 1972, Comrie 1978), alignment figures 
as a prominent typological feature both in cross-linguistic investigations and 
in the descriptions of individual languages. The term 'alignment' refers to 
the way argument roles S, A, and P - and T and G, if one extends the 
analysis to ditransitives - are organized relative to each other in the 
morphosyntax, that is, which arguments are marked identically or exhibit 
identical syntactic behavior.  The taxonomy of all logical possibilities of 
grouping the three argument roles yields five alignment types: neutral, 
accusative, ergative, tripartite, and horizontal. These basic alignment types 
are still common in characterizing whole languages or language systems 
(e.g. case marking or agreement, syntactic behavior) and serve as a basis 
for multiple typological investigations (Greenberg 1963; Nichols 1992; 
Siewierska 1996; Dryer 2002; Bickel and Nichols 2008). However, as not all 
systems of morphological marking or syntactic behavior fit neatly into one of 
the basic alignment patterns, this resulted in the modification of the basic 
taxonomy and introduction of additional types.  Particularly challenging for 
alignment typology are the patterns of argument identification found in 
languages in which the morphosyntactic properties of arguments are 
affected by referential hierarchies (e.g. in which speech-act participants 
rank higher than third persons, animate entities higher than inanimate ones, 
and known entities higher than unknown ones). Basically, three different 
types of effects of referential hierarchies can be distinguished. First, the 
hierarchical ranking of nominal referents can directly affect the marking of a 
particular argument resulting in what is known as differential object and 
differential subject marking. This phenomenon is frequently treated as a 
split in the alignment of a language system, such that arguments on 
different positions of a referential hierarchy exhibit different alignment types 
(e.g. 1st and 2nd person is neutral, whereas 3rd person is ergative). 
Another type of effects is represented by so-called 'direct/inverse' systems, 
as founde.g. in Algonquian languages. Here, morphological markers on 
transitive verbs indicate whether the agent is higher or lower in the 
referential hierarchy than the patient, i.e., whether the action goes in the 
expected direction ('direct') or against it ('inverse'). Usually, such patterns 
are not discussed in terms of alignment. Finally, the referential 
hierarchy may determine the choice and/or order of person indices on the 
verb, a system often characterized as 'hierarchical agreement' (e.g. in Tupi-
Guaranian languages): when there is only one affixal person-marking slot 
on the verb, it is the higher-ranking person that is indexed, regardless of its 
role. A similar kind of effect is observed in many Austronesian languages, 
such as Tagalog, where the constituent highest on an information-structural 
hierarchy (an argument or an adjunct) is marked in a special way and gains 
certain syntactic privileges. At the same time, the voice marking on the 
verbs indicates the semantic roles of this privileged constituent (cf. 
Schachter & Otanes 1972; Schachter 1976). One way to accommodate 
such systems into the alignment typology is to introduce additional 
alignment types called hierarchical alignment (Nichols 1992; Siewierska 
1998, 2005) and Philippine-type alignment (Mallison & Blake 1981). Such 
additional types are, however, problematic because they are based on 
other principles than the basic alignment types, namely, not on semantic 
roles (agent/patient), but on referential properties of event participants 
(Zúñiga 2007, Creissels 2009). Moreover, the introduction of the special 
alignment types conceals the fact that hierarchical systems contain traces of 
the basic alignment types (cf. Nichols 1992; Bickel 1995; Bickel and Nichols 
2008).The proposed workshop is intended to bring together scholars 
interested in the effects of referential hierarchies on the morphosyntactic 
properties of arguments and in the position of such systems in the typology 
of alignment or grammatical relations more generally. The main topics of the 
workshop will include, but are not limited to, the following:

-The theoretical status of systems exhibiting referential hierarchy effects in
alignment typology.
-The diachronic development of referential hierarchy effects in individual
languages, language families or linguistic areas from any part of the world.
-Case studies of hierarchical systems in less documented languages. 
Authors working on individual languages are encouraged to situate their 
findings in a broader theoretical/typological perspective.

References
Bickel, Balthasar. 1995. In the vestibule of meaning: transitivity inversion as
a morphological phenomenon. Studies in Language 19:73-127.
Bickel, Balthasar, and Johanna Nichols. 2008b. The geography of case. In 
The Oxford Handbook of Case, ed. Andrej Malchukov and Andrew Spencer, 
479-493.Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Comrie, Bernard. Ergativity. In W.P. Lehmann (ed.), Syntactic Typology. 
Studies in the Phenomenology of Language. Austin: University of Texas 
Press, 329-394.
Creissels, Denis. 2009a. Ergativity/Accusativity Revisited. Presented at ALT
VIII, Berkeley (www.deniscreissels.fr/public/Creissels-ergativity.pdf), 24-28
August 2009.
Dixon, R.M.W. (1972). The Dyirbal Language of North Queendland. 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dryer, Matthew S. 2002. Case distinctions, rich verb agreement, and word 
order type (comments on Hawkins' paper). Theoretical Linguistics 28:151-
157.
Greenberg, Joseph H. 1963. Some universals of grammar with particular 
reference to the order of meaningful elements. In Universals of Language, 
ed. Joseph Greenberg, 73-113. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mallinson, Graham, and Barry Blake. 1981. Language typology. Cross- 
linguistic Studies in Syntax. Amsterdam: North-Holland.
Nichols, Johanna. 1992. Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Schachter, Paul. 1976. The subject in Philippine languages: topic, actor,
actor-topic, or none of the above. In Subject and Topic, ed. Charles N. Li,
492-518. New York: Academic Press.
Schachter, Paul, and Fe T. Otanes. 1972. Tagalog reference grammar. 
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Siewierska, Anna. 1996. Word order type and alignment. Sprachtypologie 
und Universalienforschung 49:149-176.
Siewierska, Anna. 1998. On nominal and verbal person marking. Linguistic
Typology 2:1-56.
Siewierska, Anna. 2005. Alignment of verbal person marking. In The World 
Atlas of Language Structures, ed. Martin Haspelmath, Matthew S. Dryer, 
David Gil, and Bernard Comrie, 406-409. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zúñiga, Fernando. 2007. From the typology of inversion to the typology of
alignment. In New Challenges in Typology, ed. Matti Miestamo and 
Bernhard Wälchli, 199-220. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Procedure:
Abstracts are invited for 20-minute presentations plus 10 minutes for 
discussion.  Interested colleagues are invited to send an e-mail to Alena
Witzlack-Makarevich (witzlack at uni-leipzig.de) with their name, affiliation 
and a provisional abstract (max. 500 words) before 11 November 2010. 

Important dates:
- Submission of provisional abstract (max. 500 words): 11 November 2010 
- Notification of acceptance for workshop proposals will be given by 15 
December 2010. 
- If the workshop proposal is accepted, all abstracts will have to be 
submitted to the SLE by January 15, 2011 via the conference site 
(http://sle2011.cilap.es/).
- Notification of acceptance: 31 March 2011 
- Registration: from April 1 onwards 
- Conference: 8-11 September 2011





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