26.4235, Calls: General Linguistics, Historical Linguistics/Italy

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LINGUIST List: Vol-26-4235. Mon Sep 28 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.4235, Calls: General Linguistics, Historical Linguistics/Italy

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Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2015 12:06:06
From: Ilja Serzant [ilja.serzants at uni-mainz.de]
Subject: Diachronic and Functional Explanations in Linguistic Typology

 
Full Title: Diachronic and Functional Explanations in Linguistic Typology 

Date: 31-Aug-2016 - 03-Sep-2016
Location: Naples, Italy 
Contact Person: Ilja Serzant
Meeting Email: ilja.serzants at uni-mainz.de

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Historical Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 10-Nov-2015 

Meeting Description:

The aim of this workshop is to bring together historical linguists, typologists, functional linguists and other specialists to explore the role of diachronic evidence in establishing functional motivations.

Functional motivations have been assumed largely on the basis of synchronic distributions (static evidence) and, subsequently, explained by cognitive and/or processing principles. However, it has been emphasized recently that establishing such a motivation is only possible when synchronic correlations are backed up with diachronic evidence. Cristofaro (2012) argues, for example, that synchronic alignment systems found in a number of languages in fact result from different language-specific diachronic changes and are largely determined by the respective grammaticalization paths with no evidence for universals at any stage of the development. Thus, particular patterns may simply reveal themselves as diachronically/etymologically biased towards a particular constellation, in which case the assumption of some underlying universal mechanism linking these patterns may become redundant (diachronic biases). Another example is Dispersion Theory in phonology, which seeks to explain cross-lingu
 istic variation in vowel inventories in terms of conflicting functional constraints operating at the synchronic level. As shown by Vaux & Samuels (2015), this theory fails to explain a range of idiosyncratic phonological patterns and should be superseded by an evolutionary account (e.g. Blevins 2004).

At the same time, the diachronic inquiry may provide dynamic evidence for or against a particular functional motivation or universal if one can demonstrate that there is a particular development (or lack thereof) that makes a language increasingly adhere to the respective functional motivation or universal. While the traditional typology is mainly based on static evidence without taking into account diachronic biases, dynamic evidence is largely an unexplored field, studies like Bickel et al. (2015) being an exception.

The workshop will be part of the 49th annual meeting of the SLE in Naples, August 31 – September 3, 2016.

Call for Papers:

We invite short abstracts of 300 words, excluding references and examples. Abstracts should be in an editable format (e.g. .doc or .docx; no pdf will be considered) and fully anonymous. Abstracts should be sent to all workshop organizers: 

ilja.serzants at uni-mainz.de, 
natalevs at gmail.com, 
kschmidtkebode at gmail.com, 
michaelis at shh.mpg.de.

The deadline for the submission of the short abstract is November 10, 2015. 

Note that if your abstract has been included in the workshop and the workshop has been accepted, you will also have to prepare a full abstract and submit it to be reviewed by the SLE scientific committee. The deadline for the submission of full abstracts is January 15, 2016.

References:

Bickel, Balthasar, Alena Witzlack-Makarevich and Taras Zakharko. 2015. Typological evidence against universal effects of referential scales on case alignment. In Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Andrej 
Blevins, Juliette. 2004. Evolutionary phonology: The emergence of sound patterns. Cambrdige: Cambridge University Press.
Cristofaro, Sonia. 2012. Cognitive explanations, distributional evidence, and diachrony, Studies in Language 36(3), 645-670.
Vaux, Bert and Bridget Samuels. 2015. Explaining vowel systems: dispersion theory vs natural selection. The Linguistic Review 32(3), 573-599.




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