34.3801, Calls: Prosody – The Missing Link? Towards a New Appraisal of the Role of Prosody in Grammaticalization and Pragmaticalization
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LINGUIST List: Vol-34-3801. Tue Dec 19 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.
Subject: 34.3801, Calls: Prosody – The Missing Link? Towards a New Appraisal of the Role of Prosody in Grammaticalization and Pragmaticalization
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Date: 16-Dec-2023
From: Andrea Sansò [asanso at gmail.com]
Subject: Prosody – The Missing Link? Towards a New Appraisal of the Role of Prosody in Grammaticalization and Pragmaticalization
Full Title: Prosody – The missing link? Towards a new appraisal of the
role of prosody in grammaticalization and pragmaticalization
Short Title: PROS-GRAM
Date: 20-Sep-2024 - 20-Sep-2024
Location: Catania, Italy
Contact Person: Andrea Sansò
Meeting Email: pros-gramSLI57 at ugent.be
Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Phonetics; Phonology;
Typology
Call Deadline: 20-Feb-2024
Meeting Description:
Since the earliest accounts (Meillet 1912, Lehmann 1982), attrition of
phonetic substance has been recognized as a segmental phenomenon
typical of grammaticalization. Research on grammaticalization has
connected this process with the loss of prosodic prominence on the way
from lexical to grammatical elements, whereby grammaticalized elements
tend to be integrated into the prosodic structure of their host
(Wichmann 2011, Heine 2018). Moreover, erosion has been argued to be
typical of languages with strong segmental effects of stress and less
so for languages with weak stress (Schiering 2010).
Much less attention has been devoted to prosodic features of
grammaticalization processes per se, and to the place of prosody among
the factors driving linguistic change. The cross-linguistic
differences in the prosodic correlates of grammaticalization, too, are
understudied (Ansaldo & Lim 2004). This is partly due to a
methodological impasse: more often than not, it is impossible to
conduct historical studies including a prosodic strand as historical
speech data are not available (Wichmann 2011). There are, however,
ways to deal with this methodological difficulty. One strategy may be
to draw on knowledge about stress, prosodic phrasing, and metrical
structure in historical languages (Reinöhl & Casaretto 2018). Another
is to consider cases in which grammaticalization manifests itself as a
layered phenomenon, preserving lexical source items alongside their
grammaticalized outcome: Dehé & Stathi (2016: 911) have shown that in
these cases “different synchronically coexisting prosodic patterns
[may] correspond to different degrees of grammaticalization”. A
further solution is to examine neighbouring varieties where the
process of grammaticalization is at different stages. By simulating
time with space, the different steps in the grammaticalization process
can be linked to experimentally measurable features. Moreover, the
inclusion of a prosodic dimension in the analysis allows casting light
on the role of information structure in grammaticalization. Magistro
(2023b, 2023a) (see also Magistro et al. 2022, Magistro & Crocco 2022)
has investigated the three acoustic dimensions of duration, intensity
and pitch in the use of the negator mica/mia in different Venetan
varieties, which represent different degrees of grammaticalization. In
one of these varieties, Gazzolese, mia has completed Jespersen’s cycle
in that it can be used not only as a special illocutionary negation,
as in other Venetan varieties, but also as a standard negator: in the
latter use, it is shorter, reduced, and it lacks a pitch accent.
Erosion reflects the loss of focal features and consequently of
metrical strength in the new standard negator (Magistro 2023b).
Research on the emergence of discourse markers, on the other hand, has
explored more consistently the role of prosody in this process,
showing that they tend to be more separated prosodically from their
environment than the expressions from which they historically derive
(Brinton 1996, Hansen 1998, de Vries 2007, Dehé & Wichmann 2010,
Onodera 2011, Traugott & Trousdale 2013, Gonen et al. 2015, Maschler &
Miller Shapiro 2016, Gao & Tao 2021, De Cristofaro et al. 2022). This
difference in terms of prosodic correlates has been used to argue,
among other things, that the emergence of discourse markers is not the
result of grammaticalization proper, but of an entirely different
process (pragmaticalization or cooptation, Kaltenböck et al. 2011,
Heine 2023). On the other hand, the rise of discourse markers is often
connected to a similar loss in prosodic prominence as can be observed
with grammaticalization (Wichmann et al. 2010, Wichmann 2011).
Although most studies point to regularities in the prosodic features
of discourse markers, however, their behaviour is far from systematic,
making any generalizing statements about the prosody of discourse
markers “oversimplifications of a complex reality” (Crible & Degand
2021: 19).
Call for Papers:
To address these issues, and to foster exchange on an integrated
research program on prosodic aspects of grammaticalization, we invite
contributions that deal with language-specific phenomena, as well as
methodological reflections on how to investigate the role of prosody
in language change and how to leverage it to inform the study of
diachronic processes, addressing the following research questions:
● Are segmental changes in grammaticalization primary, or are
they only a consequence of prosodic changes?
● To what extent does the analysis of the prosodic correlates of
grammaticalization and/or pragmaticalization contribute to our
understanding and definition of these phenomena?
● Does prosody hold the key to distinguishing between different
historical processes leading to the emergence of grammatical vs.
discourse/pragmatic markers?
● To what extent is phonetic erosion a criterial feature of
grammaticalization? Do cases of grammaticalization without erosion
show significant prosodic phenomena?
● Are there cross-linguistic differences in the prosodic
correlates of grammaticalization, depending on the prosodic typology
of the language?
● How can the lack of historical speech data be overcome?
o Can the analysis of present-day variation illuminate change in
the past?
o Can the analysis of different but related varieties exhibiting
different stages of grammaticalization of the same items shed light on
the prosodic correlates of this grammaticalization process?
o To what extent can diachronies of different time-depths be
compared?
Abstract submission: abstracts should not exceed 2 standard A4 pages
including examples and references and should be anonymous. They should
be sent to pros-gramSLI57 at ugent.be, with names and affiliations of the
author(s) included in the body of the email.
The workshop is organized as part of the 57th Annual Conference of the
Italian Society of Linguistics (SLI – Società di Linguistica
Italiana), which will take place from 19th to 21st September 2024. All
speakers must be members of the SLI by the time of the workshop (the
annual fee is € 38) and must register to the conference. Upon
acceptance, selected contributors will receive instructions on how to
become a member and register to the conference. For any inquiries,
please contact the convenors at the address pros-gramSLI57 at ugent.be.
Important dates:
- Deadline for abstract submission: February 20, 2024
- Notification of acceptance: March 20, 2024
- Workshop: September 20, 2024
Convenors:
Anne Breitbarth, Ghent University
Claudia Crocco, Ghent University
Giuseppe Magistro, Ghent University
Andrea Sansò, University of Insubria
Scientific committee:
The convenors + Umberto Ansaldo (Curtin University), Maria Paola
Bissiri (University of Insubria), Elisa De Cristofaro (Ghent
University), Uta Reinöhl (Albert-Ludwig University, Freiburg)
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