35.2486, Calls: Formulaic Language in Historical Linguistics: data, methods, tools, and theory

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-35-2486. Thu Sep 12 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.2486, Calls: Formulaic Language in Historical Linguistics: data, methods, tools, and theory

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Date: 11-Sep-2024
From: Timo Korkiakangas [timo.korkiakangas at helsinki.fi]
Subject: Formulaic Language in Historical Linguistics: data, methods, tools, and theory


Full Title: Formulaic Language in Historical Linguistics: data,
methods, tools, and theory

Date: 02-Jun-2025 - 03-Jun-2025
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Contact Person: Timo Korkiakangas
Meeting Email: timo.korkiakangas at helsinki.fi
Web Site: https://formulaiclanguagehistorical.blogspot.com/p/call-for-
abstracts-formulaic-language.html

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Historical
Linguistics; Ling & Literature; Sociolinguistics; Text/Corpus
Linguistics

Call Deadline: 21-Oct-2024

Meeting Description:

Find the full description at the conference website: https://formulaic
languagehistorical.blogspot.com/p/call-for-abstracts-formulaic-languag
e.html

The aim of this conference is to discuss the multiple roles
formulaicity plays in historical language data, to examine the
advances of other fields in the analysis and management of formulaic
texts, and to evaluate how these advances can be applied to historical
linguistic research settings.

Many linguists, philologists, and language technologists, especially
those who work on historical language varieties, are used to formulaic
language and the challenges it poses to the interpretation of their
research data.

Various source types that are important for linguistic and
philological study, both qualitative and quantitative/computational,
are characterized by formulaic language. In historical contexts lists,
inventories, records, proceedings, contracts, official and private
letters, dedications, prayers, and technical treatises, to name but a
few, may be the only substantial sources available from a certain
period, area, or social stratum. In some cases such texts are
paradoxically also the only sources that reflect the diachronic
development of the language in question while literary texts keep on
perpetuating age-old grammatical and stylistic conventions, which
enshroud most linguistic evolution. On the other hand, literary
language may also be highly formulaic.

There are also a plethora of modern text types that contain or are
largely composed of formulaic elements: court records, dictated
medical notes, buy and sell notices, weather forecasts, social media
objects, etc., with some of them involving equally prefabricated
multimodal elements. And if formulaicity is considered a continuum,
including all types of phrasal lexical items, the major part of human
language, if not all, is constituted of structures of varying degree
of formulaicity: sociolinguistics and historical pragmatics emphasise
the functional-communicative role of formulaic utterances in specific
social contexts, while construction grammar posits that human language
consists of constructions that are more or less schematic pairings of
linguistic patterns with meanings.

Because of this omnipresence of formulaic language, formulaicity has
emerged as an important theme in various fields in the past decades.
Branches of applied linguistics, including language acquisition, have
paid growing attention to formulaic expressions and repetitiveness in
communication. There have been advances in the corpus-driven
approaches to multi-word expressions in modern languages.
Language-technological solutions have been developed to tackle
formulaic data in various practical contexts. Social and political
historians have become increasingly interested in the role of
formulaic language in historical sources: how it should be defined,
what additional information it carries in historical documents, how it
affects their analysis, and how it can (or cannot) be identified in
and extracted from text archives. This interest found a manifestation
in the Formulaic Language in Historical Research and Data Extraction
conference organized by the Resolutions Published in a Computational
Environment (REPUBLIC) project at the Huygens Institute in Amsterdam
on 7–9 February 2024, of which conference this conference can be seen
as a linguistic spin-off.

In spite of these advances, the phenomenon of formulaic language is
still mainly approached pre-theoretically in many fields of
language-related study. This is all the more acute in historical
linguistics, where so many sources are highly formulaic and where the
role of formulaicity is, perhaps, even more crucial to the correct
interpretation of sources than it is in modern-day contexts familiar
to us; for example, in epigraphy, the restoration of damaged
inscriptions relies upon the identification of formulaic expressions,
which are employed by experts to reconstruct the original text.

2nd Call for Papers:

Find the full cfp at: https://formulaiclanguagehistorical.blogspot.com
/p/call-for-abstracts-formulaic-language.html

We invite proposals for presentations that are related to one or more
of the following broad themes:

1) The definition(s) of formulae/formulaic language from a
linguistic/philological point of view. Frequency counts, co-occurrence
patterns of words and/or constructions, and fixed multi-word
expressions as single processing units are central concepts in
specific subfields of modern linguistics. How can they be applied to
the conceptualization and analysis of formulaicity in historical
language data? How do the linguistic definitions of formulae relate to
the definitions proposed in other disciplines, historical and not,
such as diplomatics, literary/poetry studies, cognition studies,
communication studies, information extraction, and text reuse
detection?

2) Formulaicity results in repetition in corpora that consist of
several formulaic texts of the same type (e.g., epigraphical
databases, documentary collections, scientific texts). This elicits
the question to what extent such repetitive data can be used in
(quantitative/statistical corpus-)linguistic research and whether
there is something that can be done to mitigate the skewing effect of
formulaicity-induced over-representation in the corpus-linguistic
analysis of historical language data. Which NLP methods are best
applicable to them?

3) Formulaic language consists of prefabricated expressions of
differing extent and rigidity indexed for particular conditions of
use. Especially in formal texts, the formulae represent “someone
else’s language” which the writer adapts to their own language. Thus,
the linguistic features of formulaic phrases do not necessarily
reflect the linguistic competences of the writer; formulae may even
contain vocabulary and grammar that is no longer or that has never
been present in the language in which a specific formulaic text is
written. This often provokes errors or hypercorrections. What
consequences such diachronic and/or stylistic diversity has to
(diachronic or socio)linguistic or philological analysis. How is
variation in formulaic sequences to be understood and operationalized?
To which extent is such variation consciously introduced?

4) Formulaic language always has a function, a role to play in a text.
Such discourse-organizational functions vary from one
communicative-pragmatic context to another. How do formulaic sequences
operate within broader textual environments within which those
sequences occur? What kinds of regularities are found between the use
of formulaic language and genres/text types? How do formulaic
sequences relate to discourse segmentation and to what extent is that
standardized? Is there any visual marking at play (multimodality)?
What is the relation of formulaic sequences to paratextual elements?

Case studies on specific datasets, methods, or computational tools, as
well as broader theoretical discussions. The presentations can be of
20 or 30 minutes followed by 10 minutes of discussion. The extra 10
minutes are reserved for presentations with a detailed explanation of
the research data and how it is processed. We are confident that a
more thorough description of the research process than usual helps
others assess its validity and, if need be, apply it to their own
datasets. Please, indicate in your abstract whether and why you prefer
to have the 10 extra minutes.

Proposals of 250 to 500 words (excl. references), followed by a short
academic bio, should be sent as docx or odt to timo.korkiakangas [ ät
] helsinki.fi by 21 Oct 2024. The conference will be held in English.
Coffee and some meals will be served. A few bursaries of 200-300 €
will be available for PhD students or other early career academics
without travel funds, depending however on the final budget of the
conference. Please, specify in your proposal if you apply for a
bursary.



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