25.4432, Calls: General Linguistics, Historical Linguistics, Typology/Netherlands

Thu Nov 6 04:01:24 UTC 2014

LINGUIST List: Vol-25-4432. Wed Nov 05 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.4432, Calls: General Linguistics, Historical Linguistics, Typology/Netherlands

Moderators: Damir Cavar, Indiana U <damir at linguistlist.org>
            Malgorzata E. Cavar, Indiana U <gosia at linguistlist.org>

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Helen Aristar-Dry <hdry at linguistlist.org>
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Date: Wed, 05 Nov 2014 23:01:09
From: Liesbet Heyvaert [liesbet.heyvaert at arts.kuleuven.be]
Subject: Categorial Shifts: From Description to Theory and Back Again

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Full Title: Categorial Shifts: From Description to Theory and Back Again 
Short Title: SLE 2015 

Date: 02-Sep-2015 - 05-Sep-2015
Location: Leiden, Netherlands 
Contact Person: Liesbet Heyvaert
Meeting Email: liesbet.heyvaert at arts.kuleuven.be

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

Call Deadline: 22-Nov-2014 

Meeting Description:

Workshop Proposal SLE 2015 Leiden
Categorial shifts: From description to theory and back again. 

The aim of this workshop is to discuss the categorial shifts involved in, for instance, nominalization and verbalization, in view of recent descriptive research. Studies on nominalization/verbalization have tended to be either inductive and crosslinguistic in focus (e.g. Hopper & Thompson 1984; Mackenzie 1987; Lehmann 1988; Givón 1990; Croft 1991; Koptjevskaja-Tamm 1993; Dik 1997) or they are deductive and theoretically oriented (see, for instance, on the English gerund: Lees 1960; Chomsky 1970; Pullum 1991; Hudson 2007). This workshop wants to pick up on the role of language-particular, micro-level descriptive studies and probe into the contribution that they can make to our general understanding of categorial shifts. In particular, informed by language-particular studies on categorical shifts (e.g. in the English -ing form), it wants to critically examine

(1) whether nominalization and verbalization can be accurately characterized as the ordered acquisition or loss of particular hierarchies of nominal or verbal categories (see, among others, Givón 1990; Croft 1991; Malchukov 2004; 2006); 
(2) how the almost exclusively synchronic perspective that has thus far been taken on categorial shifts can be linked to diachrony;
(3) what the functional underpinnings are of (trans)categorial shifts; 
(4) what benefits as well as limitations there are to a quantitatively-oriented methodological approach to the description of categorial shifts.

Call for Papers:

In this workshop, we aim to combine descriptive studies with theoretical and methodological reflection. We invite papers including but not limited to the following research questions: 

1. Is a language-particular case of categorical shift (such as, for instance, the English gerund) best described in its own terms only, by means of language-particular descriptive categories (Haspelmath 2010), or can its description lead to new, more general insights in the grammatical behaviour of the ‘comparative concepts’ of, for instance, noun and verb (Haspelmath 2010, 2012)?;
2. Are the processes of decategorization (Hopper & Thompson 1984) and recategorization (Bhat 1994) accurately described in terms of the mere loss or acquisition of certain morphosyntactic categories (e.g. the use of determiners, the noun- or verb-like inclusion of participants), or can the description of degrees of re/decategorization (viewed both as synchronic gradience and as diachronic gradualness) benefit from more fine-grained analysis (e.g. of whether the full range of determiners is exploited in a nominalization type; e.g. of how a nominalized/verbalized structure comes to function in the discourse and which collocational ties it holds with its co-text)?;  
3. What can a diachronic perspective on de- and recategorization processes in general add to our understanding of categorial shift? 
4. Gerunds have been identified as synchronic instances of ‘intersective gradience’ (Aarts 2004: 32-33). Can this synchronic view of gradience be fruitfully combined with a diachronic perspective whereby nominal and verbal gerunds themselves are said to show signs of ‘subsective gradience’ as well, as they have gradually come to resemble the noun phrase, resp. verb phrase prototype more closely? Do we need to recognize an intra-categorial type of nominalization/verbalization to account for this?  
5. Which statistical models can be adopted to quantitatively capture (gradual shifts in) the formal and functional characteristics of de- and recategorized structures? 

Workshop convenors: Liesbet Heyvaert and Hubert Cuyckens (University of Leuven)

Procedure and SLE Abstract Policy:

Please send a preliminary abstract of no more than 300 words (in .doc or .pdf format and including your name and affiliation) to liesbet.heyvaert at arts.kuleuven.be by 22 November. 

Note that a first selection of papers will then be made by the workshop convenors and submitted together with the workshop proposal to the SLE organizers by 25 November. If the proposal is accepted, all contributors will be asked to upload their 500 word abstract via the conference website by 15 January. Abstracts will then be reviewed anonymously by two members of the SLE scientific committee as well as by the convenors.

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