35.3047, Calls: SLE Workshop: Towards a better understanding of analogy: challenges, methods, and perspectives

Sat Nov 2 00:05:02 UTC 2024

LINGUIST List: Vol-35-3047. Sat Nov 02 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.3047, Calls: SLE Workshop: Towards a better understanding of analogy: challenges, methods, and perspectives

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Date: 31-Oct-2024
From: Lorenzo Moretti [lorenzo.moretti at es.uzh.ch]
Subject: SLE Workshop: Towards a better understanding of analogy: challenges, methods, and perspectives

Full Title: SLE Workshop: Towards a better understanding of analogy:
challenges, methods, and perspectives

Date: 26-Aug-2025 - 29-Aug-2025
Location: Bordeaux, France, France
Contact Person: Lorenzo Moretti
Meeting Email: lorenzo.moretti at es.uzh.ch

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Historical
Linguistics; Language Acquisition; Psycholinguistics; Text/Corpus
Linguistics

Call Deadline: 14-Nov-2024

Meeting Description:

This is a proposal for a workshop to be held as part of the 58th SLE
conference.

It has been argued that the (unconscious) ability to create analogies
across two or more complex events on the basis of the similarities of
some elements that are part of such events is one of the
domain-general cognitive skills that characterize linguistic
communication. Recent studies have shown that analogy is a pervasive
mechanism that enables language acquisition and learning (Tomasello
2003), is involved in language change (De Smet and Fischer 2017), and
influences the way we process and store language (Hoffmann 2022).

However, despite the centrality it occupies in several linguistic
theories, analogy still presents scholars with several challenges. For
once, the way in which analogy as a process actually works is still
relatively poorly understood. Since analogy was recognized as a
prominent mechanism of change by the Neogrammarians in the nineteenth
century, scholars have attempted to formulate rules that would capture
analogical tendencies (e.g., Kuryłowicz 1947 and Mańczak 1958). These
generalizations, however, have not been universally accepted, with the
result that “the elusiveness of analogy still remains” (De Smet and
Fischer 2017: 240). Secondly, it is not always clear what the term
‘analogy’ refers to. Analogy in fact has been used to describe both
the process of analogical thinking and the mechanism of language
change. It is for this reason that Traugott and Trousdale (2013) have
introduced the distinction between analogical thinking (the
motivation) and analogization (the mechanism). Furthermore, while
psycholinguistic research has developed methods to assess the impact
of analogy in language processing (e.g., eye-tracking, see Thibaut et
al. 2022), the operationalization of analogy in corpus-based,
historical research still provides methodological challenges to the
field. Statistical models, such as the Analogical Modeling of Language
(AML, Skousen 1989) and the Tilburg Memory Based Learner (TiMBL,
Daeleman and van den Bosch 2005), which employ memory-based learning
algorithms have begun to be fruitfully used in particular in
morphological studies (Krott et al. 1999; Ernestus and Baayen 2004;
Plag et al. 2007).
The aim of this workshop is to bring together scholars from different
disciplines (psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, contact
linguistics, historical linguistics) to explore the role that analogy
plays in language processing and change. We welcome both more
theoretically and methodologically-focused contributions. The latter
are an important goal of the workshop, as one of our points of
emphasis is on the empirical modelling of analogical processes,
including the possible methodological challenges that may arise in
data extraction, analysis and quantification of analogy in
corpus-based studies. Research questions that participants should
consider in their proposals should thus include one or all of the
following:

•       How can the influence of analogy in processes of language
change, processing, acquisition, and contact be operationalized and
quantified?
•       How can different methodological approaches (experimentation,
corpus data, simulation, machine learning) help us get a better
understanding of how analogy proceeds?
•       What are the prerequisites for and constraints on analogical
processes?
•       How can findings from different fields (e.g., historical
linguistics, language acquisition, psycholinguistics) be brought
together in the analysis of analogical processes?
•       What types of analogy can be theoretically identified? What
type of impact do they have in language change, processing,
acquisition, and contact?

Call for Papers:

We invite authors to submit provisional abstracts for 20-minutes
presentations, no longer than 300 words (references excluded), to be
included in the workshop proposal. Abstracts should be sent to the
convenors (lorenzo.moretti at es.uzh.ch and m.hundt at es.uzh.ch) before
November 14, 2024. If the workshop proposal is accepted, presenters
will be asked to submit a 500-word abstract by January 15, 2025.

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