25.4539, Calls: Computational Ling, Historical Ling, Lang Acquisition, Morphology, Psycholing/Netherlands

Wed Nov 12 21:50:07 UTC 2014

LINGUIST List: Vol-25-4539. Wed Nov 12 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.4539, Calls: Computational Ling, Historical Ling, Lang Acquisition, Morphology, Psycholing/Netherlands

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Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2014 16:49:56
From: Freek Van de Velde [freek.vandevelde at arts.kuleuven.be]
Subject: Shifting Classes: Germanic Strong and Weak Preterites

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Full Title: Shifting Classes: Germanic Strong and Weak Preterites 

Date: 02-Sep-2015 - 05-Sep-2015
Location: Leiden, Netherlands 
Contact Person: Freek Van de Velde
Meeting Email: freek.vandevelde at arts.kuleuven.be

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Historical Linguistics; Language Acquisition; Morphology; Psycholinguistics 

Call Deadline: 21-Nov-2014 

Meeting Description:

Convenors: Katrien Beuls (Artificial Intelligence Lab, VUB), Bernard De Clerck (Ghent University), Dirk Pijpops (KU Leuven), Freek Van de Velde (KU Leuven)

A conspicuous characteristic of Germanic languages is that they have two morphological strategies at their disposal to express the preterite. The oldest strategy is called the ‘strong’ inflection, and derives from the Proto-Indo-European aspectual ablaut system (English sing ~ sang). The ‘weak’ inflection, by contrast, is a diachronically innovative strategy in Germanic, and uses a dental suffix (English work ~ worked). 

Most verbs take either the strong or the weak inflection, but the distribution is historically (as well as socio- and dialectally) in flux: over time, many verbs have shifted from strong to weak, or – less commonly – from weak to strong, or shift from one strong ablaut class to another, or from one weak class to another. The precise developments are notoriously complicated.

The Germanic strong and weak preterite formation has been the subject of numerous studies which have approached the issue from different angles (philological, acquisitional, comparative …) (see, among others, Van Haeringen 1940, De Vriendt 1965, Seebold 1970, Tops 1974, Bybee & Slobin 1982, Bammesberger 1986, Pinker & Prince 1988, Van Coetsem 1990, Van Santen & Lalleman 1994, Hare & Elman 1995, Van Santen 1997, Kühne 1999, Nübling 2000, Pinker & Ulman 2002, Albright & Hayes 2003, Salverda 2006, Mailhammer 2006, 2007a,b, Lieberman et al. 2007, Nowak 2010, Carroll et al. 2012, Anderwald 2012a,b,c, Vosters 2012, Heinzle 2013, Cuskley et al. 2014, Knooihuizen & Strik 2014, Strik 2014; Pijpops et al. 2014; Pugliese et al. 2014).

The increasing availability of large text corpora on the one hand, and recent advances in the field of modelling/simulation on the other hand, have led to a renewed interest in what has always been a popular topic in linguistics already. We feel that the time has come to bring researchers together to exchange methods and results that can help us to bridge the gap between different approaches.

Call for Papers:

Questions that will be addressed in this workshop are:

(1) What factors (phonological proximity, frequency, prescriptivism …) play a role in the class-shift or retention of Germanic preterites?
(2) Are these factors cross-linguistically constant? Do they manifest themselves in similar fashion in L1 and L2? How can differences between various languages and language varieties be motivated?
(3) How irregular are the strong verbs? The originally more transparent ablaut system gets tousled in the course of time in the various daughter dialects of Germanic as a result of sound changes. However, the ablauting classes are still regular to some extent.
(4) Which methods are best fitted to answer which research questions and how do they tie together? And to what extent does computational modelling need to take heed of the meticulous philological details in classical historical grammars?
(5) To what extent is regularization subject to demographic changes? There is an increasing body of evidence that demographic changes affect the rate of language change in dramatic ways (see Lupyan & Dale 2010, Bentz & Winter 2013, for recent investigations). In light of this, we would expect rates of changes in the regularization of strong verbs not to be constant through time, but particularly more unwavering in times of stability, and more swift in times of massive L2-influx (see also Carroll et al. 2012).
(6) What do the morphological changes in the Germanic preterite contribute to our understanding of ‘cultural evolution of language’ (see e.g. Dediu et al. 2013)? 
(7) The major drift is towards weakening of strong verbs. However, the opposite shift (weak to strong) also occurs. How should we account for these opposing trends?

More details and references can be found here: 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/2shtiyyjskd4nw6/WorkshopProposalSLELeiden.docx?dl=0

We invite abstracts of 250-500 words on variation and/or change in the Germanic weak and/or strong preterites, from a computational, historical, philological, acquisitional, sociolinguistic or psycholinguistic perspective. Relevant questions to be addressed can be found in the session description. Please send your abstract + name + affiliation to Freek Van de Velde (freek.vandevelde at arts.kuleuven.be) before 21 November 2014.

This call for papers is part of the first step of the review procedure for workshops at the SLE conference. The procedure requires us to first submit a proposal including a provisional list of contributors and abstracts. In case the workshop is accepted, contributors will be asked to upload their 500 word abstract before January 15, 2015. The full length abstracts will be reviewed by two members of the SLE 2015 scientific committee and by the convenors.

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