35.2762, Calls: Transitivity and Labile Verbs in Typological and Diachronic Perspectives: Indo-European and Beyond

Tue Oct 8 02:05:07 UTC 2024

LINGUIST List: Vol-35-2762. Tue Oct 08 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.2762, Calls: Transitivity and Labile Verbs in Typological and Diachronic Perspectives: Indo-European and Beyond

Moderator: Steven Moran (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Justin Fuller
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Steven Franks, Joel Jenkins, Daniel Swanson, Erin Steitz
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Editor for this issue: Erin Steitz <ensteitz at linguistlist.org>

================================================================

Date: 04-Oct-2024
From: Tim Ongenae [tim.ongenae at ugent.be]
Subject: Transitivity and Labile Verbs in Typological and Diachronic Perspectives: Indo-European and Beyond

Full Title: Transitivity and Labile Verbs in Typological and
Diachronic Perspectives: Indo-European and Beyond

Date: 26-Aug-2025 - 29-Aug-2025
Location: Bordeaux, France
Contact Person: Tim Ongenae
Meeting Email: tim.ongenae at ugent.be
Web Site: https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2025/workshop-proposals/

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Historical Linguistics;
Semantics; Syntax; Typology

Call Deadline: 10-Nov-2024

Meeting Description:

The aim of the workshop is to investigate the encoding of transitivity
oppositions, with a special focus on lability and labile verbs over
time. The term ‘labile’ refers to verbs or verbal forms which can show
valency alternation with no formal change in the verb. Very often it
is only employed in narrower sense, to denote the verbs which can be
employed both transitively and intransitively, as in Eng. “The door
opened” ~ “John opened the door” or “Mary drinks tea” ~ “Mary drinks”.
While numerous works address synchronic syntax of transitivity and
labile verbs in the languages of the world, the diachronic aspects of
these phenomena are often neglected or underestimated in linguistic
and typological research.
The recent decades are marked with a considerable progress in
typological study of the encoding of transitivity oppositions in
general (see Geniušienė 1989; Kittilä 2002; Naess 2007, among others)
and the systems of labile verbs in particular, both in individual
languages, such as English (e.g. Levin & Rappaport Hovav 2005;
McMillion 2006) or French (Larjavaara 2000), and in a cross-linguistic
perspective (Nichols et al. 2004; Letuchiy 2013). Impressive results
are achieved in the synchronic study of the systems of the categories
responsible for encoding transitivity oppositions, such as voice and
other valency-changing categories: causative, anticausative, passive,
reflexive, reciprocal etc. By now, we have at our disposal rich
catalogues of the morphological, syntactic and semantic features of
these categories in the languages of the world. Since the seminal work
by Hopper & Thompson (1980), the concept of transitivity has played a
major role in the study of these and related categories. Thanks to
these studies, our understanding of transitivity phenomena has
dramatically increased. Moreover, studies in basic valency orientation
(cf. Nichols et al. 2004) have proposed a typological classification
of languages based on their preferred patterns of encoding valency
increase and valency reduction. In the last decades, lability has been
studied in the context of other valency-related phenomena, such as
morphosyntactic alignment (see Dixon 1994; Creissels 2014). However,
much less attention was paid to the diachronic aspects of transitivity
oppositions, in particular, to the evolution of labile verbs.
We invite proposals addressing topics related to transitivity and
lability in synchronic and particularly in diachronic perspective
within different methodological frameworks, in order to uncover and
explain the paths and mechanisms of the emergence and disappearance of
labile verbs as well as morphological and syntactic changes in the
domain of encoding of transitivity oppositions in the languages of the
world.

Call for Papers:

Possible topics to be addressed at the workshop include (but are not
limited to):
•       theoretical and descriptive aspects of labile verbs;
•       correlation between lability and morphosyntactic alignment;
•       the diachrony of labile verbs in individual languages and in a
crosslinguistic perspective;
•       lability replacing or being replaced by other valency-changing
phenomena;
•       types of lability (e.g. causative lability, reflexive
lability, passive lability etc.) in synchronic and diachronic
perspective;
•       mechanisms of emergence and decline of labile verbs;
•       syntactic constraints on lability;
•       verbal classes where lability is common or rare;
•       the role of language contact and other language-external
factors in the development of lability;
•       corpus-based approaches to the diachrony of lability.

We invite submission of abstracts up to 300 words (references not
included). Please send your abstracts in Word and PDF format to the
workshop organizers (Leonid.Kulikov at UGent.be; Tim.Ongenae at UGent.be;
dchistiakova at uliege.be) by November 10, 2024.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

********************** LINGUIST List Support ***********************
Please consider donating to the Linguist List to support the student editors:

https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=87C2AXTVC4PP8

LINGUIST List is supported by the following publishers:

Bloomsbury Publishing http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/

Brill http://www.brill.com

Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics

De Gruyter Mouton https://cloud.newsletter.degruyter.com/mouton

Edinburgh University Press edinburghuniversitypress.com

Equinox Publishing Ltd http://www.equinoxpub.com/

European Language Resources Association (ELRA) http://www.elra.info

John Benjamins http://www.benjamins.com/

Language Science Press http://langsci-press.org

Lincom GmbH https://lincom-shop.eu/

Multilingual Matters http://www.multilingual-matters.com/

Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG http://www.narr.de/

Oxford University Press http://www.oup.com/us

Wiley http://www.wiley.com

----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-35-2762
----------------------------------------------------------