35.2451, Calls: ICHL27 Workshop – The Comparative Method Is Not Enough: Innovating Historical Linguistic Methodology

Sat Sep 7 02:05:02 UTC 2024

LINGUIST List: Vol-35-2451. Sat Sep 07 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.2451, Calls: ICHL27 Workshop – The Comparative Method Is Not Enough: Innovating Historical Linguistic Methodology

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Date: 04-Sep-2024
From: Robin Meyer [robin.meyer at unil.ch]
Subject: ICHL27 Workshop – The Comparative Method Is Not Enough: Innovating Historical Linguistic Methodology

Full Title: ICHL27 Workshop – The Comparative Method Is Not Enough:
Innovating Historical Linguistic Methodology

Date: 18-Aug-2025 - 22-Aug-2025
Location: Santiago de Chile, Chile
Contact Person: Robin Meyer
Meeting Email: robin.meyer at unil.ch
Web Site: https://sites.google.com/view/ichl27cm

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; History of Linguistics;
Philosophy of Language; Typology

Call Deadline: 21-Oct-2024

Meeting Description:

What if historical linguistics had been conceived of not in Germany,
but in Chile or Tanzania? The linguistic, socio-historical, and
geo-political realities of 19th-century Europe have doubtlessly shaped
the assumptions and approach of the Comparative Method as developed by
researchers from Bopp to Schleicher. Although consistently employed in
essentially this form ever since, already at the end of the 19th
century, elements of the method and some of its presuppositions were
called into question by Schuchardt (1885) and others. Since then, with
the broadening of linguistic horizons beyond ‘classical’ languages, it
has become evident that other extra- or paralinguistic factors also
have a significant impact on language change, be they variationist
(Chambers & Trudgill 1998), relating to contact (Weinreich 1953;
Fishman et al. 1971; Thomason 2008; Sinnemäki fthc.), or constraining
from a typological perspective (Greenberg 1966; Walkden et al. 2023).
Even more fundamentally, the traditional comparative method only
considers phonological change and does not concern itself with the
lexicon, morphology, or syntax.

While still a useful tool in many cases and from a macroscopic
perspective, it is nevertheless clear that the Comparative Method
alone is no longer enough to answer the questions that have emerged
recently from these new insights. Rather, the Comparative Method needs
to be integrated with a wider, holistic approach that moves away from
assuming rigid and ideal regularity, exceptionlessness and
universality. This approach more centrally takes into account
multilingual dynamics, in particular of language ecologies outside of
Europe and the Global North (Meyer 2023; Marten fthc.). In this way,
our conceptualisation of language change is reoriented from a
deterministic to a more probabilistic model that can work with and
account for multiple dimensions – contact, sociolinguistics, typology,
and uncertainty.
Since the recent addition of genetic and archaeological data and
methods to the consideration of language change (Heggarty et al.
2023), it is imperative and timely to also re-evaluate the soundness
of the basic linguistic methods that are used. This workshop seeks to
bring together researchers at any career stage interested in the
methodological and epistemological questions entailed by going beyond
the Comparative Method to a more current, holistic understanding of
and approach to language change – a New Comparative Method. The
following questions serve as guidelines, but other questions on the
same subject are very welcome:
 ● What historical biases need to be considered in order to understand
the origins of and issues with the Comparative Method?
 ● How can contact-induced and non-contact-induced change be modelled?
Should the tree analogy be replaced?
 ● What role do typological constraints play in language change and
how can they be integrated into a model thereof?
 ● What mathematical models are available to test and operationalise
such a multifactorial method?
 ● What does a holistic approach mean for well-established cases where
the traditional method is believed to work well (e.g. Indo-European
languages)?
 ● Most fundamentally: what is it that we actually reconstruct? Can we
reconstruct phoneme and morpheme inventories, syntax, indeed whole
languages – or are we only doing linguistic ‘algebra’?

Call for Papers:

Relevant abstracts of no more than 800 words (excl. references) should
be sent to Robin Meyer (robin.meyer at unil.ch) by 21 October 2024 in PDF
format.

Please note that ICHL workshops are in most cases restricted to 6
papers; all other papers, if accepted, will be given as part of the
ICHL general sessions. Should there be sufficient interest for an
extended workshop (up to 12 papers), we will lobby the local
organisers to permit this format.

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