27.3305, Calls: Historical Ling, Socioling/USA

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LINGUIST List: Vol-27-3305. Wed Aug 17 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.3305, Calls: Historical Ling, Socioling/USA

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Date: Wed, 17 Aug 2016 12:56:00
From: Janet Giltrow [janet.giltrow at ubc.ca]
Subject: Atomizing Linguistic Change & the Nuclear Step: From In

 Full Title: Atomizing Linguistic Change & the Nuclear Step: From In 

Date: 31-Jul-2017 - 04-Aug-2017
Location: San Antonio, Texas, USA 
Contact Person: Janet Giltrow
Meeting Email: janet.giltrow at ubc.ca
Web Site: http://ichl23.utsa.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Workshop-Atomizing-Linguistic-Change.pdf 

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Sociolinguistics 

Call Deadline: 01-Dec-2016 

Meeting Description:

Traditional approaches to language change have often taken as a point of
departure a ‘systems-based’ view of language: properties and tendencies are
ascribed to abstracted structural entities that are not reducible to the
properties and tendencies of individuals, manifested in individual acts of
physical realization. It is as if the abstracted entity had a life of its own:
if the “system” wants to become more analytic, how is this “tendency”
(teleological or not) also represented in the individual act? Very often,
system-based theories (e.g. Lightfoot 1979) arrive at conclusions that are
very different from hypotheses that are closer to the individual speech act
(Stein 1990). Systembased theories stress the commonalities, and not the
differences, between the individual acts and their completely different
contextualizations, a fact only partially represented by the concept of
“variation”, which, however, is also predicated on groups, and not on
individuals.

There is, however, a theoretical gap between theories about tendencies at the
level of the system (the macro-level) and the processes observed in the
generation of speaker innovation (the micro-level). Explanations in linguistic
change theory have never systematically and consistently related the two
levels. It is, however, widely acknowledged that the ultimate locus of
micro-origination of language change is innovation on the part of the speaker.
But what makes an individual speaker produce innovations in the first place?
It is at this point that any theory of language change, any “tendency”, such
as pragmatic strengthening or a move toward analyticity, must be plausible.
Are these long-term tendencies of “the language” always “unintended”
consequences of individual acts that are very differently motivated (Keller
1990/1994)? LePage and Tabouret-Keller (1985), for instance, posit that there
is purposefulness in the way speakers move their language, but not due to
properties of the form of language. It would appear that most of the problems
of explaining language change stem from what Roy Harris (1981) has termed the
two major language myths, “telementation” and the “fixed code” fallacy: that
language consists of immutable form-function prefabs that by themselves
somehow travel from speaker to hearer. It would appear that any attempt to
explain language change at its source must take off from a realistic look at
how communication using actual linguistic forms happens. It is intriguing to
analyse the process in detail, from a more interactive perspective of language
use.


Call for Papers:

The workshop invites papers that address the following basic issues:

1. What makes speakers deviate in the individual speech act and produce
speaker innovations?
2. What makes other speakers reproduce the innovations, so that change
ultimately results? (Does this take us in a second big direction?)
3. How can individual emergence phenomena be explained at the level of speaker
innovations and from there onwards?



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