35.3266, Calls: 58th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE 2025)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-35-3266. Sat Nov 16 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.3266, Calls: 58th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE 2025)

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Date: 14-Nov-2024
From: John Mansfield [john.mansfield at uzh.ch]
Subject: 58th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE 2025)


Full Title: 58th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea
(SLE 2025)
Short Title: SLE

Date: 26-Aug-2025 - 29-Aug-2025
Location: Bordeaux, France
Contact Person: John Mansfield
Meeting Email: john.mansfield at uzh.ch
Web Site:
https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2025/second-call-for-papers/

Linguistic Field(s): History of Linguistics; Semantics; Typology

Call Deadline: 19-Nov-2024

Meeting Description:

The Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE) and the University Bordeaux
Montaigne are pleased to announce the “58th Annual Meeting of the
Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE 2025)”, to be held in Bordeaux,
26-29 August 2025.

SLE meetings provide a forum for high-quality linguistic research from
all (sub)domains of linguistics. The upcoming edition of the SLE
meeting will also host a round table of experts to discuss topics of
special linguistic interest.

Call for Papers:

Disentangling contact and inheritance in lexical semantics

We invite scholars working on areal or phylogenetic dimensions of
lexical semantics to submit abstracts of up to 300 words for a
proposed workshop at SLE 2025. Please send abstracts to John Mansfield
john.mansfield at uzh.ch and Paul Widmer paul.widmer at uzh.ch, by Tuesday
19 November. We will include selected abstracts in our workshop
proposal, which will be evaluated by the SLE committee. If successful,
final abstracts will be due in January.

Recent years have seen growth in the study of comparative lexical
semantics, especially but not limited to the “colexification” paradigm
(François 2008). Colexification research investigates, for example,
the distribution of languages that either distinguish HAND from ARM,
or “colexify” HAND/ARM. Much more research is still required to
understand how such distributions are shaped by phylogenetic
inheritance and areal contact.

A special issue of Linguistic Typology on Areal Semantics (Schapper &
Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2022) has highlighted the need for more systematic
research on areal clustering of lexical meanings. For example
languages of the Hindu Kush area use kinship terms that group into
geographic clusters, while cross-cutting phylogenetic clades
(Liljegren 2022). Similarly, a region of western Africa exhibits
particular colexifications of colour terms with natural colour sources
(e.g. YELLOW = LOCUST BEAN), though the presence of many unrelated
lexemes indicates conceptual patterns that have spread through
multilingual interaction, as opposed to purely lexical inheritance
(Segerer & Vanhove 2022). These studies highlight that inheritance in
lexical semantics can be considered either in terms of phylogenetic
clades, specific etymologies, or cognate sets.

Other studies have focused more on the diachronic dimension. Various
studies have investigated common semantic changes in etymological
chains (e.g. Wilkins 1996; Traugott & Dasher 2001), and several
projects are now underway to investigate these effects more
systematically, including EvoSem (François & Kalyan 2023) and DiACL
(Carling et al. 2023).

Both areal and phylogenetic dimensions can also be studied against the
background of universal patterns in lexical semantics. Semantic
research here intersects with cognitive science and theories of
communicative efficiency, with key findings on kinship (Kemp & Regier
2012), colour (Zaslavsky et al. 2020), numbers (Calude & Verkerk
2016), and the natural environment (Regier et al. 2016). This
intersection has led to a burst of research on global colexification
patterns, focusing especially on general cognitive biases relating to
efficiency, similarity and association. These biases drive similar
colexification patterns among languages of the world (Srinivasan &
Rabagliati 2015; Youn et al. 2016; Xu et al. 2020; Brochhagen & Boleda
2022; Tjuka et al. 2024), as well as child language (Brochhagen et al.
2023) and artificial language learning (Karjus et al. 2021).

While systematic global studies have tended to focus on lexical
semantic universals, in this workshop we are seeking submissions that
pay particular attention to how universals are modulated by areal and
phylogenetic effects, and especially studies that aim to disentangle
the two. In typological research more generally, there have been
significant recent advances in distinguishing contact vs inheritance
(e.g. Ranacher et al. 2021; Allassonnière-Tang et al. 2021; Neureiter
et al. 2022; Guzmán Naranjo & Mertner 2023). An obvious next step is
to apply such methods to lexical semantics, which will provide a more
robust test for claims of universals, while also investigating claims
of areality in a more rigorous way.

We particularly seek submissions characterised by:
1.      Methodological innovation and statistical techniques;
2.      Investigation of large datasets



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