32.4029, Calls: Gen Ling, Historical Ling, Semantics, Syntax, Typology/Romania

Tue Dec 28 18:18:21 UTC 2021

LINGUIST List: Vol-32-4029. Tue Dec 28 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.4029, Calls: Gen Ling, Historical Ling, Semantics, Syntax, Typology/Romania

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Date: Tue, 28 Dec 2021 13:17:53
From: Chiara Gianollo [chiara.gianollo at unibo.it]
Subject: A hundred years of negative concord

Full Title: A hundred years of negative concord 

Date: 24-Aug-2022 - 27-Aug-2022
Location: Bucharest, Romania 
Contact Person: Chiara Gianollo
Meeting Email: chiara.gianollo at unibo.it
Web Site: https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2022/calls-workshop-proposals/ 

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Historical Linguistics; Semantics; Syntax; Typology 

Call Deadline: 15-Jan-2022 

Meeting Description:

The workshop 'A hundred years of negative concord' has been accepted for the
55th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE 2022, Bucharest,
24-27 August 2022). It is organized by Johan van der Auwera (Antwerp) and
Chiara Gianollo (Bologna). 

A century ago Jespersen (1922: 352) introduced the notion of ‘concord of
negatives’, nowadays called ‘negative concord’. Fifty years later Labov (1972)
quickened the interest in negative concord, with a focus on African American
Vernacular English. The attention then lapsed, but with an interlude of a
quarter century we are now in the heyday of negative concord research. Current
work deals with variation, within one language and across languages, mostly
synchronic, from a formal, mostly generative angle or a functional-typological
one. Catalysts were four doctoral dissertations, viz. Laka (1994), Giannakidou
(1997), Kahrel (1996) and Haspelmath (1997). An appreciation of the current
state of the art can be gained from de Swart (2010), Larrivée & Ingham (eds.)
(2011), Willis, Lucas & Breitbarth (eds.) (2013), Hansen & Visconti (eds.)
(2014), van der Auwera & Van Alsenoy (2016), Giannakidou & Zeijlstra (2017),
and Breitbarth, Lucas & Willis (2020).

>From both the formal and the functional-typological perspectives negative
concord is studied in relation to negative polarity, negation and
indefiniteness. Simplifying somewhat, the formal perspective has yielded a
sophisticated understanding of language-specific distinctions in Eurasian
languages, esp. European ones, whereas the typological perspective has made
one appreciate that there is a lot of variation in the world at large, but the
perspective is necessarily coarse-grained. Both approaches have uncovered the
complex interplay of structural and pragmatic factors in the diachronic
emergence and in the synchronic distribution of negative concord, highlighting
its significance for general models of linguistic variation (for instance, by
connecting negative concord to general mechanisms of agreement, by
investigating its interaction with word order, by singling out possible
motivations behind what has been interpreted as a form-meaning mismatch or as
a case of multiple exponence).

Another parallel discovery in the formal and functional-typological research
traditions concerns the fact that, besides the existence of some general
patterns, which allow one to assign a type to a language as a whole (e.g.
‘Double Negation language’ or ‘Strict Negative Concord language’), one also
observes the existence of language-internal variation tied to the individual
lexical items. For instance, connective (correlative) negation
(‘neither….nor’) often shows an idiosyncratic behaviour with respect to
negative concord (de Swart 2001; Doetjes 2005; van der Auwera, Nomachi &
Krasnoukhova 2021), a fact that can have diachronic consequences (Gianollo
2018). With respect to lexically determined structural variation, the tests
used to distinguish between negative polarity items and negative concord items
have been shown to be language-specific to a certain extent, making it
difficult to establish consensual descriptive tools and terminology. Other
facts concerning distribution, such as the asymmetry in frequency between
strict and non-strict negative concord languages, and areal tendencies, still
await proper treatment.

The SLE workshop is designed to take stock and to set the agendas, with an eye
towards increased cross-fertilization.

Call for Papers:

The Call for Papers is now open (deadline: January 15, 2022).

Abstracts should not exceed the 500-word limit and should be submitted in
EasyChair (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sle2022) by January 15,
2022.

Themes include:
1 / What are the major unsolved questions in the formal approaches? Can the
answers profit from the increasing appreciation of world-wide variation? 
2 / Is it feasible to work on the typology of negative concord with the
increased sophistication that comes from typically formal language-specific
accounts?
3 / In both strands of research corpus work is increasingly important, both in
synchronic work and in diachronic work – in the latter, corpus work is the key
method. How can corpus findings steer the theoretical work?
4 / Despite the early work on Afro-American Vernacular English and the
analysis of the differences with Standard English in the seventies, most
synchronic work has associated a language with one doculect. In generative
research the doculect is often a standard language, and in typological work,
it is often the one variety of the one village of the one field worker. Can
the research on negative concord overcome these restrictions?
5 / What is the contribution of diachronic research to the theoretical debate?
How can incipient negative concord be characterized in structural and
pragmatic terms? What is the relationship between the rise / demise of
negative concord and Jespersen’s Cycle? How to deal with variation and
optionality in historical documents?

GUIDELINES FOR SUBMISSION:
Please follow the general SLE guidelines for submission:

https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2022/third-call-for-papers/  (guidelines
about what abstracts should contain)

https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2022/abstract-submission/ (practical
information about how to submit them)

In submitting a workshop abstract, you will be asked to select the relevant
workshop. 

Please also note that in order to submit an abstract you will have to be a SLE
member. For SLE membership, please go to
https://societaslinguistica.eu/membership. Abstracts submitted by non-members
will not be considered.

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