22.2471, Calls: General Linguistics/Germany

Tue Jun 14 15:30:45 UTC 2011

LINGUIST List: Vol-22-2471. Tue Jun 14 2011. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 22.2471, Calls: General Linguistics/Germany

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1)
Date: 14-Jun-2011
From: Bernd Moebius [moebius at coli.uni-saarland.de]
Subject: DGfS 2012 WS Information Density & Linguistic Variation

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2011 11:29:26
From: Bernd Moebius [moebius at coli.uni-saarland.de]
Subject: DGfS 2012 WS Information Density & Linguistic Variation

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Full Title: DGfS 2012 WS Information Density & Linguistic Variation 
Short Title: DGfS-2012 AG-11 

Date: 06-Mar-2012 - 09-Mar-2012
Location: Frankfurt am Main, Germany 
Contact Person: Elke Teich
Meeting Email: e.teich at mx.uni-saarland.de
Web Site: https://dgfs.de/cgi-bin/dgfs.pl/tagung?lang=en 

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 18-Jul-2011 

Meeting Description:

DGfS 2012 Workshop on 'Information Density and Linguistic Variation'

Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft fuer Sprachwissenschaft
AG 11: Information Density and Linguistic Variation
Frankfurt, Germany
March 6-9, 2012
https://dgfs.de/cgi-bin/dgfs.pl/tagung?lang=en

In recent years, there has been growing interest in linguistic complexity in various areas of linguistics, including grammatical theory (Hawkins 2004), diachronic linguistics (e.g., Dahl 2004), phonetics (e.g., Chitoran et al. 2009), psycholinguistics (e.g., Jaeger 2010) as well as sociolinguistics (Trudgill 2011). While this has brought many new insights into selected aspects of language, we still do not have a conclusive picture of the role(s) linguistic complexity plays or should play in linguistic theory and in modeling linguistic processes. There are various perspectives from which linguistic complexity can be approached, including entropy, emergence, optimality or adaptivity. In the planned workshop, we propose to focus on the perspective of information density (Levy & Jaeger, 2007) - the average amount of information in a text or utterance as determined by its predictability - and to explore its relation to one of the central features of the linguistic system, namely, variation. We would like to address questions of the following kind: To what extent is linguistic variation governed by a desire for constant information density, thus putting limits on linguistic variation? In which ways is linguistic variation a precondition to (optimal) information density? How does information density at different linguistic levels (grammatical, phonological, etc) influence the options in the linguistic system within and across languages?

The workshop is intended to bring together scholars from different areas of linguistics, including syntax, phonetics/phonology, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, contrastive linguistics, language typology, corpus linguistics (and others) who work on the relation of linguistic variation and linguistic complexity/information density.

Chitoran, I., Ch. Coupe, E. Marsico & F. Pellegrino (eds.) (2009): Approaches to phonological complexity. Berlin and New York: Mouton deGruyter.

Dahl, Oe. (2004): The growth and maintenance of linguistic complexity. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Hawkins, John A. (2004): Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jaeger, T.F. (2010): Redundancy and reduction: Speakers manage syntactic information density.  Cognitive Psychology 61. 23-62.

Levy, R. & T.F. Jaeger (2007): Speakers optimize information density through syntactic reduction.  Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.

Trudgill, P. (2011): Sociolinguistic typology. Sociolinguistics determinants of linguistic complexity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Invited Speakers:

John Hawkins (Cambridge/UC Davis)
Harald Baayen (Alberta) 

Call for Papers:

Important Dates:

Abstract submission deadline: July 18, 2011
Notification of acceptance: September 15, 2012
Submission of final abstract: November 1, 2012
DGfS 2012 Conference: March 6-9, 2012

Requirements:

Abstracts should be 300-400 words (1 page) and may contain additional material, such as examples, figures and references on another page. Altogether submission should be no longer than 2 pages. As reviewing will be double blind, the paper should not include the authors' names and affiliations.

Submission Information:

All submissions must be submitted electronically as PDF and sent by e-mail to d.schreyer at mx.uni-saarland.de putting 'DGFS 2012 AG11' in the subject line.

The deadline for submission is July 18, 2011.

Organization:

Matthew Crocker, Bernd Moebius, Elke Teich (Saarland University)

Program Committee:

Artemis Alexiadou
Harald Baayen
Miriam Butt
Matthew Crocker
Vera Demberg
Caroline Fery
Jonathan Harrington
Florian Jaeger
Frank Keller
Roger Levy
Anke Luedeling
Bernd Moebius
Ingo Reich
Elke Teich
Shravan Vasishth

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