36.1092, Confs: Disentangling Literacy Effects on Grammatical Structures (Workshop Proposal) (France)

Tue Apr 1 02:05:04 UTC 2025

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-1092. Tue Apr 01 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.1092, Confs: Disentangling Literacy Effects on Grammatical Structures (Workshop Proposal) (France)

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Date: 28-Mar-2025
From: Andrea Sansò [asanso at unisa.it]
Subject: Disentangling Literacy Effects on Grammatical Structures (Workshop Proposal)

Disentangling Literacy Effects on Grammatical Structures (Workshop
Proposal)

Date: 01-Jul-2026 - 03-Jul-2026
Location: Lyon, France
Contact: Andrea Sansò
Contact Email: asanso at unisa.it

Linguistic Field(s): Typology

Submission Deadline: 25-Apr-2025

We would like to submit a workshop proposal for the ALT 2026
conference (Lyon, France, July 1-3, 2026). Below you’ll find a first
draft of the call, which we will use as the basis for the final
proposal. If anyone is interested in participating, we kindly ask you
to send a title and, possibly, a short abstract (up to 300 words) to
the following addresses by April 25:
Caterina Mauri: caterina.mauri at unibo.it
Andrea Sansò: asanso at unisa.it
Many thanks in advance!
"Disentangling literacy effects on grammatical structures"
Convenors: Silvia Ballarè (Bologna), Caterina Mauri (Bologna),
Ludovica Pannitto (Bologna), Andrea Sansò (Salerno)
As Linell (2005) argued, modern linguistics is deeply affected by a
written language bias, a systematic tendency to generalize properties
of written language as if they were neutral or universal features of
language per se. This bias impacts grammatical theory, obscuring or
downplaying features of spoken language—such as fragmentation,
hesitations, repetitions, on-line syntax, and interactional
structures—which are less likely to be captured in grammatical
descriptions. Similarly, foundational work by Chafe and Mithun (Chafe
& Tannen 1987; Mithun 1988) has highlighted key structural and
functional differences between spoken and written discourse, noting
that grammar itself may develop differently under the pressures of
face-to-face communication versus planned, written production, and
that specific grammatical structures such as conjunctions are often
borrowed once a language with no literary tradition comes into contact
with one with literary tradition.
While much is known about how other broad-scale factors such as
speaker populations shape languages (e.g., Nichols 1992; Sinnemäki &
Di Garbo 2018), and despite widespread awareness of the written
language bias, typological research still struggles to adequately
model how literacy shapes grammar. This is partly because systematic
information on literacy is available for only a minority of the
world’s languages, and because phenomena underrepresented in written
corpora or standard descriptions raise significant methodological
challenges.  More fundamentally, however, the main difficulty lies in
disentangling the effects of literacy from other co-occurring factors.
This workshop aims to advance the empirical and theoretical study of
literacy’s impact on grammar by bringing together research that
critically examines the written language bias and proposes new data,
methods, or frameworks for including less-documented spoken features
into typological comparison and addressing literacy from a
cross-linguistic perspective.
We welcome abstracts dealing with the following issues:
 - Theoretical reflections on the written language bias in typology
and linguistic theory
 - Methodological reflections on how to assess literacy within a
speakers’ community, including multilingual ones
 - Case studies on the impact of literacy on morphosyntax, discourse
structure, or information packaging
 - Cross-linguistic variation in grammatical structures that may be
sensitive to literacy
 - Comparative studies of literate vs. non-literate varieties within
the same language
 - Methodologies for assessing literacy levels across language samples
 - Challenges and opportunities in using large-scale typological
databases (e.g., WALS, Grambank) to investigate spoken language
features
 - Insights from discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, or
interactional linguistics into cross-linguistic patterns of spoken
grammar
 - Historical or diachronic perspectives on how literacy influences
grammatical change
References
Chafe, W., & Tannen, D. (1987). The Relation Between Written and
Spoken Language. Annual Review of Anthropology, 16(Volume 16, 1987),
383–407. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.16.100187.002123
Linell, P. (2005). The Written Language Bias in Linguistics. Its
Nature, Origins and Transformations. London: Routledge.
Mithun, M. (1988). The grammaticization of coordination. In J. Haiman
& S. Thompson (Eds.), Clause combining in grammar and discourse (pp.
331–360). Benjamins.
Nichols, J. (1992). Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time. University
of Chicago Press.
https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226580593.001.0001
Sinnemäki, K., & Garbo, F. D. (2018). Language Structures May Adapt to
the Sociolinguistic Environment, but It Matters What and How You
Count: A Typological Study of Verbal and Nominal Complexity. Frontiers
in Psychology, 9, 342569. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01141

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