28.3743, Calls: Gen Ling, Hist Ling, Ling Theories, Socioling/France

Tue Sep 12 16:49:34 UTC 2017

LINGUIST List: Vol-28-3743. Tue Sep 12 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.3743, Calls: Gen Ling, Hist Ling, Ling Theories, Socioling/France

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Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2017 12:49:26
From: Peter Petre [peter.petre at uantwerpen.be]
Subject: Constructionist approaches to individual grammars (proposed workshop proposal at ICCG10)

Full Title: Constructionist approaches to individual grammars (proposed workshop proposal at ICCG10) 

Date: 16-Jul-2018 - 18-Jul-2018
Location: Paris, France 
Contact Person: Peter Petre
Meeting Email: peter.petre at uantwerpen.be
Web Site: https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/projects/mind-bending-grammars/calls/ 

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Historical Linguistics; Linguistic Theories; Sociolinguistics 

Call Deadline: 01-Dec-2017 

Meeting Description:

Language is inherently a communal phenomenon. Wittgenstein showed that private
languages are incoherent (1953: §243). Yet language also only exists in the
unique minds of individuals. The central question to this workshop is how
usage-based theories of grammar, and particularly constructionist approaches,
can best model the the linguistic relations between idiosyncratic language and
alignment to the community flow. 

Cognitive construction grammar has been put forward as a psychologically
plausible model of language knowledge of individuals. Support comes from child
language acquisition research (Tomasello 2009), experiments (Goldberg 2006),
as well as neurology (Allen et al. 2012, Pulvermüller et al. 2013). And yet
most studies still model constructions at the level of the community only.
While this may be inevitable in most corpus-based studies, it calls into
question the ontological status of such aggregate models, and what they are
supposed to represent. 

This workshop wants to look at the interaction of individual and communal
language use from different perspectives, and how to make this interaction
more explicit in a usage-based theory. We particularly invite morphosyntactic
work from sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, language acquisition or
psycholinguistics, but other angles are also welcome. 

Language acquisition & psycholinguistics: Cognitive linguistic work has shown
that speakers acquire grammars that are significantly different from each
other (Dabrowska 2012). What kinds of idiosyncracy, and to what degree, are
possible in adult language before recurrent communicative problems arise? How
far can non-canonical associations, such as those apparent in blends (e.g. De
Smet 2013), be stretched before becoming ‘private language’? Frequency is
another concept that is underrepresented in constructionist models. More
frequent patterns are more easily accessible, and hence will be more readily
used. But frequency can be both internal (self-priming, as in idiosyncratic
filler words) and external. Do these two types of frequencies represent
different types of knowledge? 

(Historical) Sociolinguistics & Historical linguistics: Grammars not only
differ across individuals, they also change with time. How does an
individual’s linguistic knowledge evolve and interact with that of their
peers? Do we need to assign primacy to communities of practice
(change/linguistic structure, only ‘exists’ if enough members adopt a usage)
or to individuals (who will only adopt/innovate if their respective grammars
are ‘ready’). Is competition of inter-individual variants different from
intra-individual competition? Also, does the (lack of) intra-individual change
represent (lack of) participation in a communal shift, age-grading effects, or
is it mostly a matter of personality? Can we set up similarity measures of
constructions and groups of constructions between individuals? To what extent
could such similarity measures help us understand who adopts innovations?
Older language users for instance have highly entrenched routines, and are
less likely to adopt innovative language. Is this mostly a matter of
item-based entrenchment? Or is there also a relationship with how they have
organized their grammar as a network – which may help in explaining
exceptions? And how can we represent such ‘distances’ between individual
grammatical traits in a general usage-based model of language?

Call for Papers:

Abstracts:

Abstracts for theme session papers (20 mins talk plus 10 min. discussion) have
to be submitted to the general conference email (see below). The abstracts
will be evaluated and selected by the general scientific committee, not by the
theme session organizers. 

Guidelines for abstract submission:

The length of each abstract should not exceed 500 words, not including
references. Abstracts must be submitted electronically to the following
address: iccg10 at sciencesconf.org.  Abstracts will be reviewed anonymously and
therefore must exclude all references to the author(s). 

Important Dates:

Submissions start : September 1, 2017 
Deadline for reception of abstracts : December 1, 2017 
Notification of acceptance : February 1, 2018 
Program announcement : March, 2018 
Early registration deadline : April, 2018

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