35.2579, Calls: Linguistic Data and Language Comparison in Light of the ‘Quantitative Turn’ and ‘Big Data’ – a Workshop and Symposium

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-35-2579. Mon Sep 23 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.2579, Calls: Linguistic Data and Language Comparison in Light of the ‘Quantitative Turn’ and ‘Big Data’ – a Workshop and Symposium

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Date: 20-Sep-2024
From: Sandra Auderset [sandra.auderset at unibe.ch]
Subject: Linguistic Data and Language Comparison in Light of the ‘Quantitative Turn’ and ‘Big Data’ – a Workshop and Symposium


Full Title: Linguistic Data and Language Comparison in Light of the
‘Quantitative Turn’ and ‘Big Data’ – a Workshop and Symposium

Date: 07-May-2025 - 09-May-2025
Location: Department of Linguistics, University of Bern, Switzerland
Contact Person: Sandra Auderset
Meeting Email: data_ws_unibe at gmx.ch

Linguistic Field(s): Discipline of Linguistics; General Linguistics;
Language Documentation; Linguistic Theories; Typology

Call Deadline: 15-Nov-2024

Meeting Description:

This workshop provides a forum for in-depth discussion and exchange on
theoretical and methodological issues related to linguistic data and
language comparison by exploring the relationship of data gathering,
analysis, and annotation practices in linguistics in light of the
'quantitative turn' and the advent of ‘big data’. A particular focus
lies on synchronic and diachronic comparison and the role of
understudied/endangered languages.
In recent years, linguistics has undergone a ‘quantitative turn’. The
uptake for such approaches has been greater in some subfields than in
others. In subfields focusing on language description and comparison
(both synchronic and diachronic) many remain skeptical, especially
with respect to the integration of understudied and/or endangered
languages. Quantitative methods applied in linguistic typology and
historical linguistics often need relatively ‘big’ data sets resulting
in a rise in large-scale databases including extensive reference
catalogs such as Glottolog (Hammarström et al. 2024), comparative
typological data bases such as the World Atlas of Language Structures
(Dryer & Haspelmath 2013) and more recently GramBank (Skirgård et al.
2023), and large cognate-coded word lists such as IE-Cor (Heggarty et
al. 2023), among many others. These resources are often used to make
broad, universal claims about the interplay of language and cognition
(Hahn 2020), language and social structure (Lupyan & Dale 2010,
Shcherbakova et al. 2023), language and genetics (Dediu 2011), and
language and climate (Everett et al. 2015, Everett et al. 2016), among
others. ‘Big data’ sets all involve standardization, multiple levels
of abstraction, and a view of language as composed of separable,
domain-specific building blocks. The alternative view – of language as
interaction and an interconnected system – has led to lower-level
(regional, family-specific, etc.), but more detailed and less
abstractive micro-typologies. Such studies reveal that there is
considerable internal diversity within language families and
subgroups, which is key to understanding diachronic processes.
The question of how to model diachronic processes has also been at the
center of recent developments in historical linguistics. Bayesian
phylogenetics have found  wider adoption in the past decade but remain
controversial. The main points of skepticism concern whether
biological models of evolution are applicable to languages at all
(e.g. Campbell 2024: 23) and the issue of relying solely on ‘lexical’
data. At the same time, classifications based on expert opinions and
qualitative methods are often accepted without much scrutiny, even if
the data remain inaccessible to other scholars. Thus there has been a
move towards open datasets in historical linguistics, often with
considerable efforts to make the analytical choices, for example in
cognate annotation, transparent.
Finer-grained, family-internal and truly bottom-up approaches and
methodologies are easier to connect with language documentation and
description efforts that have increased over the past decades.
However, the question of how to integrate this data into comparative
studies, both qualitative and quantitative, is not resolved. This is
especially pertinent for spoken language data, which forms the bulk of
language documentation, but so far plays only a minor role in typology
and diachronic linguistics.
In general, discussions on the notion and role of data with respect to
analysis and theory often revolve around how language-specific data
can be related to cross-linguistic definitions and concepts (see e.g.
Alfieri et al. 2021). Much less attention is paid to the ontological
underpinnings of what constitutes (primary/secondary) data and how the
preparation and annotation of this data influences qualitative and
quantitative theories and models.

Full call with references: https://tinyurl.com/45t6ta6y
More info coming soon: https://tinyurl.com/3uh4xwke

Call for Papers:

Potential talk and discussion topics include but are not limited to:
    • types of linguistic data and their relationship to qualitative
and quantitative analyses
    • transparency and reproducibility in the context of primary and
secondary data
    • the role of understudied and endangered languages in
methodological and theoretical advancements
    • biases in annotation and analysis of linguistic data and how
they can be addressed or mitigated
    • the connection of quantitative/computational methods and
language documentation, especially how they can mutually benefit each
other
    • models and methodologies for bottom-up language comparison
    • database design principles and their effect on linguistic
theorizing
    • ‘best practices’ for quantitative and statistical methods
drawing on a diverse set of data
    • models of collaboration between researchers focusing on
different aspects of data management and analysis (e.g. recordings and
annotation, statistical modeling, questionnaire development)

Submission guidelines:
Interested researchers should send an abstract of their proposed talk
and a brief motivation letter including their general research
interests as they relate to the topic of the symposium. It’s not
necessary to anonymize the documents - name and affiliation should be
included. Please note that all participants are expected to attend the
full workshop in person. Format:
    • Abstract: max. 400 words excluding references but including
examples
    • Motivation letter: max. 400 words
    • e-mail a single PDF file named: lastname_dataws.pdf to
data_ws_unibe at gmx.ch

Travel grants:
A limited number of small travel grants are available. Applications
for the travel grants will be open to accepted participants who are
based abroad and cannot secure funding otherwise. Details will be sent
out with the notifications for acceptance.



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