26.294, Calls: Text/Corpus Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics/France

Fri Jan 16 19:59:38 UTC 2015

LINGUIST List: Vol-26-294. Fri Jan 16 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.294, Calls: Text/Corpus Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics/France

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Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 14:59:33
From: Evangelia Adamou [adamou at vjf.cnrs.fr]
Subject: Information Structure in Spoken Language Corpora 2

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Full Title: Information Structure in Spoken Language Corpora 2 
Short Title: ISSLaC2 

Date: 02-Dec-2015 - 04-Dec-2015
Location: Paris, France 
Contact Person: Evangelia Adamou
Meeting Email: isslac2 at vjf.cnrs.fr
Web Site: http://llacan.vjf.cnrs.fr/isslac/index.html 

Linguistic Field(s): Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Text/Corpus Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 30-Apr-2015 

Meeting Description:

The study of information structure (IS) is primarily established for well-described languages, but there is a clear need for new data from a greater variety of languages (Büring 2009). Indeed, IS theory has been criticized as being shaped by just a handful of languages (Matić & Wedgwood 2013). Moreover, new evidence from lesser-known languages seems to challenge previously established assumptions (Rialland & Robert 2001, Adamou & Gordon 2014 among others).

But the attempt to analyze IS is often considered a ‘luxury’ in the study of lesser-known or endangered languages despite its centrality in actual communication. One important reason is that the study of IS is complex and requires the analysis and interaction of several linguistic levels, involving syntax, morphology, and prosody. This implies an excellent understanding of the so-called canonical syntactic and prosodic structures of a given language, which is already an enormous and time-consuming task.

Also, IS in major-communication languages is often analyzed through intuitive judgments, elicitation, experimental tasks, and rich corpus analyses (Calhoun 2010), offering the possibility of conducting both qualitative and quantitative studies. However, the implementation of these methods in the context of understudied and, in particular, endangered languages, proves to be extremely challenging. Most linguists working on such languages have no native speaker intuitions, and speakers often have difficulties with elicitation tasks involving metalinguistic awareness. Furthermore, while the study of spontaneous speech may appear as an alternative to using experimental or elicited data, the existing text corpora of under-documented or endangered languages are relatively limited in size, often lack explicit question-answer pairs that are needed for the study of focus, and the context and speakers’ intentions are difficult to analyze (Schultze-Berndt & Simard 2012). Thus, on one hand the study of IS phenomena in lesser-known languages is crucial for the understanding of IS cross-linguistically; on the other hand, it poses a particular challenge because of the difficulty to obtain reliable data.

This conference aims at providing an opportunity to discuss the above-mentioned methodological problems, possible solutions, as well as research findings from the study of lesser-known languages in relation to their impact on the theory of IS.

Invited Speakers:

Sasha Calhoun (Victoria University of Weelington)
Dejan Matić (MPI for psycholinguistics, Nijmegen)
Marianne Mithun (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Candide Simard (SOAS University of London)
Stavros Skopeteas (Bielefeld University)
Eva Schultze-Berndt (Manchester University)
Claudia Wegener (Bielefeld University)

Organizers:

Evangelia Adamou (CNRS)
Katharina Haude (CNRS)
Magali Sansonetti-Diraison (CNRS)
Marc Van de Velde (CNRS)
Martine Vanhove (CNRS)
Jeanne Zerner (CNRS)

Call for Papers:

We invite abstracts for 30-minute talks (plus 10 minutes for discussion) addressing any of the following topics:

- Case studies illustrating the impact of lesser-known languages on the IS theory
- Corpus-based studies of lesser-known languages, obstacles and solutions
- Studying IS prosody outside the lab
- Producing quantitative studies for lesser-known languages

Important Dates:

Deadline for abstract submission: April 30, 2015.  
Notification of acceptance: June 30, 2015.

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