32.3410, Calls: Disc Analysis, Gen Ling, Pragmatics, Text/Corpus Ling, Typology/Romania
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LINGUIST List: Vol-32-3410. Fri Oct 29 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.
Subject: 32.3410, Calls: Disc Analysis, Gen Ling, Pragmatics, Text/Corpus Ling, Typology/Romania
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Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2021 08:47:20
From: Izabela Jordanoska [izabela.jordanoska at cnrs.fr]
Subject: Language in Narrative and Song: Dedicated Grammar, Linguistic Creativity and Endangered Oral Traditions
Full Title: Language in Narrative and Song: Dedicated Grammar, Linguistic Creativity and Endangered Oral Traditions
Date: 24-Aug-2022 - 27-Aug-2022
Location: University of Bucharest, Romania
Contact Person: Izabela Jordanoska
Meeting Email: izabela.jordanoska at cnrs.fr
Linguistic Field(s): Discourse Analysis; General Linguistics; Pragmatics; Text/Corpus Linguistics; Typology
Call Deadline: 14-Nov-2021
Meeting Description:
This workshop focuses on linguistic phenomena that occur in folktales,
stories, oral traditions and narratives; and in the methodological challenges
that come with them. Since oral traditions are getting lost, so are the data
that come with them. This limits our knowledge about the breadth of phenomena
that may occur in language, because there are certain aspects of grammar that
only occur in oral traditions. Elicitation, but even naturalistic spoken data
that mostly consist of dialogues, are sometimes not enough to uncover all
grammatical aspects of a language. The language used for everyday
conversations often differs from the language used in oral traditions, which
often contain special constructions.
Similarly to how language games and secret languages (see for example Ka
(1988) on the Wolof-based secret language Kàll) have long been used to find
evidence for syllabification, stories can shed light on language change or
reveal certain lexical items that otherwise are not used.
For example, Nikitina (2018) has shown that certain grammatical constructions
and linguistic elements in Wan (Mande) are only found in oral traditions, and
that moreover, these are getting lost with the demise of storytelling. These
include ideophones for describing actions without verbs and logophoric
pronouns for switching between the roles of the narrator and characters in the
story. Thus, this has uncovered a case of language attrition, despite the
language being generally classified as not endangered and even gaining
speakers.
Turpin (2005), has found that in Central Australian songs in Arandic
languages, certain consonants and vowels are realized differently than in
everyday speech, that there are special song registers; and that, through the
use of archaic forms, songs can teach us about the diachrony of the languages.
Furthermore, there are different types of narratives. Some are naturalistic
and spontaneous, such as narratives of people’s life events, whereas others
are highly staged, such as folk stories performed by professional
storytellers. These different types of narratives often correspond to
different methodologies for getting stories, such as visual prompts (e.g.,
Frog Stories (Mayer 1969), Pear Stories (Chafe 1980), the picture task
designed by San Roque et al. (2012)), the labovian strategy of asking people
to recount dramatic life events (Labov 1972), or asking people (both
professional storytellers and laypeople) to recite folktales. To the best of
our knowledge, however, the types of data from these different outputs have
not been compared yet.
Bickel (2003) has used the Pear Stories to show cross-linguistic differences
in the frequency of overt noun phrases in narratives. But even having the same
prompts does not necessarily lead to comparable narratives, as Clark (2004)
has shown for Frog Stories. For example, the temporal sequence between the
pictures is not always made, or the function of the frog is not interpreted
the same way across participants. Furthermore, picture tasks are also used
online nowadays; is there a difference in the output produced by online versus
on location picture tasks?
The issue of data compatibility is related to corpus compatibility, since
research in storytelling often requires the use of corpora. Levshina (2021)
has recently pointed out several challenges in corpus-based typology. While
corpora are a good way to get quantificational data for, for example, language
universals, there is still eurocentrism in the availability of corpora, and
different corpora made by different people are not always straightforward to
compare with each other. We aim to connect typology to the narratologist
literature as a way of matching properties of various corpora. Thus, we will
be paying special attention to comparing corpora and data compatibility
issues.
Call for Papers:
We invite typological and descriptive studies using narrative data, covering
cross-linguistic linguistic phenomena found in such data and different
linguistic areas. Submissions to the workshop may include, but need not be
limited to:
Methodological issues in the study of narrative grammar. How can we make
corpora compatible for comparison? Does the use of the same prompts yield
comparable stories in different cultural and linguistic settings?
Terminological issues: what we consider stories are sometimes histories, even
if they have the same grammatical properties as personal narratives. How do we
define stories?
What is the relation between information structuring devices and narrative
structure? Which linguistic elements are used for certain strategies for
driving the plot and structuring the narrative? Examples of different ways of
expressing such strategies include head-tail/tail-head linkage and other
bridging constructions (see De Vries 2005, Aikhenvald (2019), Guérin and Aiton
(2019), i.a.), converbs, clause chaining (for example Robert 2010 for Wolof).
How are characters linguistically represented in stories? For example:
personification, reference tracking, representing inner worlds of characters
and reported speech.
The continuum between purely grammatical elements and rhetorical strategies.
Is there such a thing as a special narrative grammar? Examples of narrative
grammar could be special word forms that only occur in narratives. For
example, narrative aspect and narrative tense verb forms, or special story
registers. What are their properties and how are they used?
What is the role of interjections, discourse markers, onomatopoeia and other
‘peripheral’ word classes in storytelling?
What is the role of formulaic expressions in stories?
Are there differences in language use or prosody in different parts of the
story, i.e., the set-up, the culmination?
What are some language/culture-specific elements in the structure of
narratives, and how do they influence the way we can make generalizations or
compare narratives on a cross-linguistic level? For example, most Australian
Aboriginal narratives are 'travel stories' following various locations in the
landscape, which often makes them quite inaccessible to hearers unfamiliar
with the geographic context (Rumsey & Weiner 2001).
What are the roles of other media and extra-linguistic cues in stories? For
example special intonation, or the use of visual media, such as in Central
Australian sand stories (Green 2016)?
We often find that in songs within narratives other languages than the
language of the narratives itself are used, as are invented words,
unintelligible speech and pseudowords. What is the significance of these
foreign or unintelligible portions, how are they used, and can we trace back
their origin? For example, synchronic pseudowords could be mondegreens from
another language that no-one in the community speaks anymore.
Conference Email:
izabela.jordanoska at cnrs.fr
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