28.768, Confs: Historical Ling, Typology/Sweden

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-28-768. Thu Feb 09 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.768, Confs: Historical Ling, Typology/Sweden

Moderators: linguist at linguistlist.org (Damir Cavar, Malgorzata E. Cavar)
Reviews: reviews at linguistlist.org (Helen Aristar-Dry, Robert Coté,
                                   Michael Czerniakowski)
Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Editor for this issue: Kenneth Steimel <ken at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: Thu, 09 Feb 2017 10:41:08
From: Ljuba Veselinova [ljuba at ling.su.se]
Subject: The Negative Existential Cycle from a Historical-Comparative Perspective

 
The Negative Existential Cycle from a Historical-Comparative Perspective 

Date: 04-May-2017 - 05-May-2017 
Location: Stockholm, Sweden 
Contact: Ljuba Veselinova 
Contact Email: negative.existential.cycle at gmail.com 
Meeting URL: http://www.ling.su.se/negative.existentials.cycle 

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Typology 

Meeting Description: 

The purpose of this meeting is to gather together scholars with an interest in
cyclical processes of language change, the evolution of negation and the use
of comparative data for modelling paths of change.

The evolution of negation is often discussed in terms of a grammaticalization
process dubbed Jespersen Cycle by Dahl (1979). Within this process, negation
markers are seen to originate from emphatic elements in the negative phrase
which gradually lose their sense of emphasis and are eventually interpreted as
general verbal negators. Croft (1991) has suggested negative existentials as
another source for negation markers. This author presented his hypothesis
under the name Negative Existential Cycle (NEC). Despite renewed interest in
cyclical processes in language change cf. (van Gelderen 2008, 2009, Willis,
Lucas & Breitbath 2013), the NEC has received little attention. In order to
examine its realizations from a wider cross-linguistic perspective we, Ljuba
Veselinova (U of Stockholm) and Arja Hamari (U of Helsinki), have started a
collaborative effort; we are hereby inviting other scholars to join in.

Veselinova has devoted several articles to a critical examination of the NEC
cf. (Veselinova 2014, 2015, 2016). In these works she tests the NEC by
applying it to comparative data from six families: Slavic, Uralic, Turkic,
Dravidian, Berber and Polynesian. The main results of these tests can be
summarized as follows

(i) Negative existentials commonly break into the domain of standard/verbal
negation via their uses with nominalized verb forms.
(ii) In the typical case, negative existentials take over only parts of verbal
negation e.g. a specific tense-aspect category. These partial take-overs tend
to last for very long periods of time and thus look like stable states.
(iii) Negative existentials are most likely to take over the whole domain of
standard negation in languages where predicate concatenation is very
productive
(iv) Negative existentials are constantly renewed.

A more detailed overview of the generalizations outlined here is presented at
the workshop website www.ling.su.se/negative.existentials.cycle .

Lexington Books, https://rowman.com/LexingtonBooks are interested in
publishing a peer-reviewed book on this topic. Following their interest, we
are planning an edited volume where the NEC is tested on a family based sample
with a world-wide coverage. To this end we are now seeking collaboration with
other scholars who have expertise on specific language families and have an
interest in in issues similar to those outlined below:

- Processes whereby negative existentials or other lexicalizations of negation
break into the domain of standard negation
- Are there any language specific characteristics that trigger or halt the NEC
- The time duration of cyclical processes

The goal of this conference is to establish collaboration between scholars who
are interested in the evolution of negation and in the interaction between
special and standard negators.

Confirmed Participants:

Prof. Elly van Gelderen, U of Arizona
Prof. Johan van der Auwera, U of Antwerpen

References:

For reasons of space the references mentioned above are listed here
www.ling.su.se/negative.existentials.cycle .
 

Program: 

May 4:

9:00-9:10:
Opening

9:10-9:40:
Elly van Gelderen, Arizona State University, USA
Various kinds of cycles

9:40-10:10:
Annemarie Verkerk, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
A phylogenetic study of negative existentials

10:10-10:40:
Johan van der Auwera, Frens Vossen and Olga Krasnoukhova, University of
Antwepen, Belgium
Intertwining the negative cycles

10:40-11:10: Coffee break

11:10-11:40: 
Rasmus Bernander, University of Gothenburg, Hannah Gibson SOAS, University of
London & Maud Devos, Royal Museum of Central Africa, Belgium
The negative existential cycle in Bantu

11:40-12:10:
Braden Brown, University of Buffalo
If you're not there, you don't exist: A look at Bantu negative existentials

12:10-12:40:
Marielle Butters, University of Colorado at Boulder
Negative Existentiald in Chadic Languages

12:40-14:00: Lunch

14:00-14:30:
David Willis, University of Cambridge
A negative existential cycle in Welsh?

14:30-15:00:
Johan Brandtler, University of Gent, Belgium & David Håkansson, Uppsala
University
>From existence to omnipresence. The diachronic development of the Swedish
negative marker inte

15:00-15:30:
Lílian Teixeira de Sousa, Federal University of Bahia
Change in Brazilian Portuguese Sentential Negation

15:30-16:00: Coffee break

16:00-16:30:
Joanna Sitaridou, University of Cambridge: The rise of novel negators in
Romeyka 
Negative Existential Cycle and monoclausality

16:30-17:00:
Elsa Oreal, LLACAN/CNRS
The negative existential cycle in Egyptian

17:00-17:30:
David Wilmsen, American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates
NEC x 3: Three negative existential cycles in Arabic

Dinner  

May 5:

9:00-9:30:
Anuradha Sudharsan, The English & Foreign Languages University, Telengana
State, India
The rise of the modern Kannada negatives

9:30-10:00:
Sonya Oskolskaya & Natalia Stoynova, Russian Academy of Sciences
Two scenarios of intergration of negative existential into the standard
negation system:  The case of Nanai aba

10:00-10:30:
Vlada Baranova, HSE/ILS RAS, St Petersburg & Daria Mishchenko ILS RAS, St
Petersburg/LLCAN, Paris
The negative existential cycle in Kalmyk and Bashkir

10:30-11:00: Coffee break

11:00-11:30:
Cherry Lam, University of Cambridge
Negation system in varieties of Chinese-- interaction between Croft's negative
existential cycle and BE/HAVE evolution

11:30-12:00:
Nicole Kruspe, Lund University & Niclas Burenhult, Lund University
Explorations in the Negative: the case of Aslian (Austrasiatic, Malay
Peninsula)

12:00-12:30:
Irina Gorbunova, Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow
The negative existential cycle in Ayatal, an Austronesian language of Northern
Taiwan

12:30-13:30: Lunch

13:30-14:00:
Louward Allen Zubiri, University of the Philippines, Diliman
Negative existentials in Philippine Languages

14:00-14:30:
Bernhard Wälchli, Stockholm University
The evolution of negation in Nalca (Mek, Tanah Papua), or, how nothing easily
moves to the middle of a word

14:30-15:00:
Andrés Pablo Salanova, Jérémie Beauchamp & Adriana Machado Estevam, University
of Ottawa, Canada
Negative Existential Cycle in Jê languages

15:00-15:30: Coffee break

15:30-16:00:
Ruti Bardenstein, Tel.Aviv University
The rectification Cycle

16:00-16:30:
Karen de Clercq, Ghent University/FWO and Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal, Hebrew
University  of Jerusalem
Negative clefts breaking into the domain of Standard Negation: Eastern Aramic
law and Sicilian neca

16:30-17:00:
Andrea Nuti, University of Pisa, Italy
Verbal Path from Latin to Romance, dynamic state-of-affairs, textual
strategies and factors that give rise to a cyclical process

17:00-17:30: Concluding remarks, volume planning





----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-28-768	
----------------------------------------------------------
Visit LL's Multitree project for over 1000 trees dynamically generated
from scholarly hypotheses about language relationships:
          http://multitree.org/