33.89, Calls: Linguistic Theories/USA

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-33-89. Thu Jan 13 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.89, Calls: Linguistic Theories/USA

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Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2022 20:48:43
From: Adina Camelia Bleotu Deborah Foucault [cameliableotu at gmail.com]
Subject: Jabberwocky Words in Linguistics (Online)

 
Full Title: Jabberwocky Words in Linguistics (Online) 

Date: 11-Feb-2022 - 12-Feb-2022
Location: Online, Bucharest, Amherst, USA 
Contact Person: Adina Camelia Bleotu
Meeting Email: cameliableotu at gmail.com

Linguistic Field(s): Linguistic Theories 

Call Deadline: 20-Jan-2022 

Meeting Description:

The current online workshop is co-organized by Adina Camelia Bleotu
(University of Bucharest) and Deborah Foucault (University of Massachusetts
Amherst). It will be a combination of refereed presentations and invited
talks. It aims at bringing into focus research which sheds light on linguistic
structures/phenomena by means of non-existent words. The workshop welcomes
research making use of possible nonce words, i.e., words which happen not to
be part of the current language but could potentially exist (such as ''blick''
in ''The man blicked yesterday''). 

Previous experimental work has used nonce words to investigate how children
acquire language. In particular, nonce words have been employed to investigate
the syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis, according to which children use
syntactic cues to get to the meaning of words. The hypothesis originates as
early as 1957, when Robert Brown showed experimentally that preschool-aged
children could use their knowledge of different parts of speech to distinguish
the meaning of nonsense words in English (''Do you see any/ a sib?'', ''What
is sibbing?''). Later, Gleitman (1990) coined the term ''syntactic
bootstrapping'', and further on stressed the importance of syntactic cues in
acquisition. Interesting experimental work further ensued (Naigles, 1990;
Soja, 1992; Höhle et al., 2004; Cristophe et al., 2008; Syrrett et. al., 2010;
Yuan & Fisher, 2012; Jin & Fisher, 2014; He & Lidz, 2017; Cao & Lewis, 2021;
Huang et al., 2021; a.o.): to elaborate on one influential work, Naigles
(1990) showed by means of a (video-based) eye-tracking paradigm that
2-year-olds who hear ''The duck is kradding'' the rabbit interpreted
''kradding'' as the act of the duck pushing on the rabbit, whereas 2-year-olds
who hear ''The duck and the rabbit are kradding'' interpret ''kradding'' as
the act of both animals doing something (arm waving). The nonce paradigm has
the advantage of eliminating lexical biases created by existent words in the
lexicon, and, instead, isolating the issue of interest. In addition to their
relevance for the acquisition of (lexical) semantics, nonce words have also
been employed to investigate the acquisition of morphology. The famous Wug
Test, created by Jean Berko Gleason in 1958 and replicated multiple times,
used nonce words to explore children’s acquisition of plural morphology (''one
wug-two wugs''), possessives (''wug’s'', ''wugs’'') and verbal morphology
(''He zibs''). 

For more information about the conference contact us at the meeting email
above.


2nd Call for Papers:

We welcome experimental papers employing nonce words within various
methodologies (act-out tasks, truth value judgment tasks, eye-tracking,
story-telling, artificial language learning, a.o.) to investigate certain
linguistic phenomena/structures (first and second language acquisition,
language processing, online and offline methodological issues, a.o.). We also
welcome corpus and theoretical work which provides new insight into how novel
words are created and what this can tell us about the linguistic mechanisms
people make use of. We invite abstracts for 30-minute talks (with a 10-minute
discussion included). Abstracts should be no longer than 500 words in a font
size no less than 12pt, with an additional page including examples, figures
and references. Abstracts should be anonymous. Contact details (author’s name
and affiliation) and the title of the presentation should be included in the
accompanying email.

Please send your abstract (PDF format) to cameliableotu at gmail.com,
dfoucaulteth at umass.edu

Important Dates:

Deadline for abstract submission: January 20, 2022
Notification of acceptance: February 1, 2022
Workshop: February 11-12, 2022

Invited speakers (in alphabetical order):

Jennifer Culbertson (University of Edinburgh) and Alexander Martin (Université
de Paris)
Brian Dillon (University of Massachusetts Amherst) and Jon Burnsky (University
of Massachusetts Amherst)
Heidi Harley (University of Arizona)
Jeff Lidz (University of Maryland)
Letitia Naigles (University of Connecticut)
Emma Nguyen (University of California, Irvine)
Tom Roeper (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Kristen Syrett (Rutgers University)
Lyn Tieu (Western Sydney University)




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