27.3361, Calls: Historical Ling, Ling Theories/USA

Tue Aug 23 19:01:29 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-3361. Tue Aug 23 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.3361, Calls: Historical Ling, Ling Theories/USA

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Date: Tue, 23 Aug 2016 15:00:57
From: Chris Lucas [cl39 at soas.ac.uk]
Subject: Arabic and Contact-Induced Change

Full Title: Arabic and Contact-Induced Change 

Date: 04-Aug-2017 - 04-Aug-2017
Location: San Antonio, Texas, USA 
Contact Person: Chris Lucas
Meeting Email: cl39 at soas.ac.uk

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Linguistic Theories 

Call Deadline: 01-Dec-2016 

Meeting Description:

This workshop starts from the position that the Arabic language (arguably a
language family), with its lengthy written history, wide and well-studied
dialectal variation, and involvement in numerous heterogeneous contact
situations, constitutes an invaluable laboratory for understanding processes
of contact-induced change in general.

Until recently, however (e.g. Lucas and Lash 2010, Manfredi forthcoming),
diachronic work on Arabic has shown limited interest in contributing to models
of contact-induced change. Moreover, even within Arabic studies, there have
been very few attempts to synthesize what is known about the outcomes of the
many well-documented historical contacts between Arabic and other languages
(Thomason 2006, Versteegh 2001, 2010). It is therefore hardly surprising that
approaches to contact-induced change that are crosslinguistic in scope have
tended to neglect the data that Arabic and its contact languages have to offer
(though see Matras 2009, Trudgill 2011 for partial exceptions). This neglect
is perhaps most striking when it comes to the area of creolistics. Despite
their historical and typological significance, Arabic-based pidgins and
creoles have received surprisingly little attention either from creolists or
indeed Arabists (Owens 2001) and, despite recent moves to rectify this state
of affairs (e.g. Almoaily 2013, Bizri 2010, Manfredi and Tosco 2014, Wellens
2005), there is still little wider awareness or understanding of the
socio-historical implications of pidginization and creolization in Arabic.

At the same time, there has recently been a flurry of interest in producing
and elaborating general theories of contact-induced change that go beyond the
sociocultural paradigm of language maintenance and shift proposed by Thomason
and Kaufman (1988). Relevant work here includes Van Coetsem (1988, 2000),
Heine and Kuteva (2005), Winford (2005), Aikhenvald (2007), Ross (2007),
Chamoreau and Léglise (2012), Bakker et al. (2013), and Aboh (2015). It is
clearly crucial for continued progress in this area that further detailed,
theoretically informed descriptions of individual contact-induced changes are
made available, and that they are drawn from as many typologically and
sociologically distinct contact situations as possible. Data from the history
of Arabic and its contact languages have a great deal to offer in this regard.

The overarching goal of the workshop is to pool the resources of Arabists and
historical linguists for the benefit of both fields – to emphasize both the
centrality of language contact for Arabic historical linguistics, and the
importance of the Arabic language for a typological understanding of
contact-induced change. In particular, we seek to address questions such as
the following:

- How can current models of contact-induced change improve our understanding
of attested changes involving Arabic as a contact language?
- Are there data from changes involving Arabic which challenge one or more of
these models?
- To what extent does the current state of knowledge regarding Arabic-based
pidgins and creoles support – or challenge – theories of creole genesis and
the typology of pidgins and creoles?
- Is there a bias in favour of (or against) seeing changes in the history of
Arabic as being contact-induced? What about changes in Berber varieties,
Neo-Aramaic varieties, Swahili, and other languages that have undergone
intensive contact with Arabic?
- More generally, what new metrics can be developed to improve our ability to
reliably distinguish between external and purely internal change?
- To what extent do differences in the socio-historical circumstances of
contact situations involving Arabic correlate with distinct outcomes in terms
of contact-induced change?

Call for Papers:

Presentations at this workshop are invited that address any of the questions
in the description, drawing on diachronic data from Arabic and one or more of
the languages with which it has been in contact.

Abstracts should be submitted using the following EasyChair page:
https://easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?key=42140483.bgEyg9xFm43NQgNb.

Abstracts should be a maximum of two pages in length, including references,
and may focus on any aspect of historical linguistics.  Abstracts should be
submitted via the conference Easy Chair link.  (If you have problems using
Easy Chair, please contact ichl23 at utsa.edu.). Authors may present a maximum of
two papers, whether single-authored or co-authored.  Abstracts will be
reviewed anonymously by at least three members of the Scientific Committee.

Abstracts may be submitted for the General Session or for one of the Workshops
listed below. Abstracts submitted for a workshop but not accepted there will
be automatically considered for inclusion in the general session.

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