35.2351, Calls: Theorizing Word-Class Change in the History of Languages

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-35-2351. Fri Aug 30 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.2351, Calls: Theorizing Word-Class Change in the History of Languages

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Date: 28-Aug-2024
From: María Mare [mare.purcigliotti at gmail.com]
Subject: Theorizing Word-Class Change in the History of Languages


Full Title: Theorizing Word-Class Change in the History of Languages

Date: 18-Aug-2025 - 22-Aug-2025
Location: Santiago de Chile, Chile
Contact Person: María Mare
Meeting Email: mare.purcigliotti at gmail.com
Web Site: https://ichl27santiago.cl/portfolio/

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Linguistic Theories;
Morphology

Call Deadline: 18-Oct-2024

Meeting Description:

One of the most easily observed changes in the diachrony of languages
concerns word classes in a broad sense. This change involves verbs
with semantic content becoming auxiliaries, nouns and adjectives being
used as adverbs, adjectives and verbs being employed as nouns,
referential expressions losing their referential properties, numeral
classifiers functioning as indefinite determiners, and so on. Most of
these cases are described as conversion, which is defined as a
non-concatenative process (i.e. derivation without affixes), and is
one of the most productive means of forming new words in many
languages (see, for instance, Kim 2010). However, as they involve not
only a change of category but also differences in their grammatical
properties, some of these changes have been analyzed as cases of
grammaticalization (see Narrog & Heine 2017).

Beyond the label, this phenomenon has raised many questions about
categories: (a) do lexemes belong to a word-class or are they unmarked
(Valera 2005)?; (b) is there a directionality on word-class changes?;
(c) can contact situations favor this change?; (d) is there any
content relation between categories that facilitate the process? The
goal of this workshop is to discuss word-class changes without
derivational morphology from different theoretical frameworks. The aim
is to identify cross-linguistic regularities and analyze how different
theoretical models account for this variation.
It is worth noting that this proposal seeks to continue the research
developed in the workshop on categorizers in diachrony in the ICHL 26,
since word-class change involves categorizers or, at least changes in
the functional information associated with them.

Call for Papers:

Research questions and aims:
We welcome further contributions (in both English and Spanish) to the
workshop that address word-class changes from different frameworks, in
order to share perspectives on the following questions and beyond:
 • Which kinds of word-class changes can we find across languages?
 • How can we relate this phenomenon to assumptions about categories
and functional information?
 • What are the common properties/features that might motivate this
kind of changes?
 • How could the empirical evidence on this topic refine the
theoretical frameworks?
 • Where are the shared properties/features located: in the lexical
items, in the syntax, in neighboring elements?

For more details on how to apply, please visit the link below.



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