26.4822, Calls: History of Ling/UK

Fri Oct 30 15:04:37 UTC 2015

LINGUIST List: Vol-26-4822. Fri Oct 30 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.4822, Calls: History of Ling/UK

Moderators: linguist at linguistlist.org (Damir Cavar, Malgorzata E. Cavar)
Reviews: reviews at linguistlist.org (Anthony Aristar, Helen Aristar-Dry, Sara Couture)
Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

*****************    LINGUIST List Support    *****************
Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
              http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Ashley Parker <ashley at linguistlist.org>
================================================================

Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2015 11:04:23
From: Philomen Probert [philomen.probert at wolfson.ox.ac.uk]
Subject: Long-term Histories of Grammatical Traditions

Full Title: Long-term Histories of Grammatical Traditions 

Date: 17-Sep-2016 - 17-Sep-2016
Location: Oxford, United Kingdom 
Contact Person: Philomen Probert
Meeting Email: philomen.probert at wolfson.ox.ac.uk

Linguistic Field(s): History of Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 31-Jan-2016 

Meeting Description:

Expressions of interest are invited for a working group on the long-term histories of grammatical traditions, and on the interactions between different grammatical traditions. The activities of the working group will include a workshop; participation will be generously funded for up to ten participants by the project's sponsor, the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council. Activities will also include preparing individual contributions for publication, and contributing to a multi-authored article; publication mentoring will be offered to early-career participants and any others who would like such support.

Subject Area:

When a language changes, concepts of grammatical description may remain the same in name while acquiring a different value. For example, the distinctive contrast between long and short vowels found in Classical Greek was lost at some point after the Classical period, yet grammarians continued to operate with the concept that some vowels were 'long' and others 'short', and continued to put this concept to work in describing the language as a whole. Statements of possible positions for the word accent continued to invoke this distinction between 'long' and 'short' vowels: the accent fell on one of the last three syllables in the word, and normally on one of the last two if the final syllable contained a 'long vowel'. For this purpose, the teaching of traditional vowel lengths survived into the school tradition on modern Greek until fairly recently. In effect, what had once been an audible or surface distinction became an abstract or underlying feature—a technical device that helped i
 n the description of complex patterns of alternation. 

Terms and concepts of grammatical description may also be borrowed from the description of one language into that of another. But the grammatical categories of one language may not map neatly onto those of another. As a result, features of one language may be imported into the description of another, but at an abstract level of the descriptive system. For example, Latin grammars influenced the early English grammatical tradition, with results including the idea that English nouns and adjectives have all the grammatical genders and cases found in Latin. These features of Latin could be imported on an abstract level as long as one recognised that grammatical gender never determines the form of an English noun or adjective, and most of the cases sound identical (see e.g. U. Dons, Descriptive Adequacy of early modern English grammars, Mouton de Gruyter 2004, pp. 39–53, 214–16; H. Gwosdek, Lily’s Grammar of Latin in English, Oxford University Press 2013, pp. 136–7).

Fruitful work has been done, and is currently being done, on topics connected to the long-term histories of grammatical traditions and their interactions with one another. Much of this work is naturally embedded in scholarship on the individual languages involved. But it is also worth taking a comparative perspective: what common themes and problems emerge if scholars working on such topics talk to each other?

For further details, please see the Call for Papers.

Call for Papers:

Activities of the Working Group:

The first formal output of the working group will be a workshop, to be held on Saturday 17 September 2016 at Wolfson College, Oxford. Regular communication within the group will be expected in the preceding months, to identify themes and problems on which to focus the workshop. After the workshop, participants will be expected to contribute to a multi-authored article synthesising the results of the workshop, to show what we gain from a comparative approach.

Also after the workshop, participants will be encouraged to publish their individual contributions in the journals or other channels most appropriate for their own work. Early-career participants, and any others who would like such support, will be offered feedback on a draft written version, and advice towards peer-reviewed publication. An additional channel of dissemination will be a website advertising the publications of the working group and providing links to open-access versions wherever possible. For example, a participant whose individual contribution concerns the Japanese grammatical tradition might submit the work to a journal that reaches specialists in Japanese, while the website would preserve the comparative perspective of the workshop itself.

This project is generously supported by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council, which will fund participation in the workshop for up to ten participants.

How to Express an Interest:

To express an interest in participating please write to Dr Philomen Probert (philomen.probert at wolfson.ox.ac.uk) by 31 January 2016, outlining your interest in the project and your preliminary ideas for a possible contribution to the workshop. As co-ordinator of the working group, Dr Probert will discuss ideas with potential contributors, and will select the final list of contributors. The selection will be based on (i) the relevance of proposed contributions to the project, and (ii) the aim to include a range of different grammatical traditions in the project. 

About the Arts and Humanities Research Council: 

The UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funds world-class, independent researchers in a wide range of subjects: languages and linguistics, ancient history, modern dance, archaeology, digital content, philosophy, English literature, design, the creative and performing arts, and much more. This financial year the AHRC will spend approximately £98m to fund research and postgraduate training in collaboration with a number of partners. The quality and range of research supported by this investment of public funds not only provides social and cultural benefits but also contributes to the economic success of the UK. For further information on the AHRC, please go to: www.ahrc.ac.uk.

----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-26-4822	
----------------------------------------------------------