36.57, Confs: General Linguistics; Historical Linguistics; Language Documentation; Typology / France

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LINGUIST List: Vol-36-57. Fri Jan 10 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.57, Confs: General Linguistics; Historical Linguistics; Language Documentation; Typology / France

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Date: 10-Jan-2025
From: Sonia Cristofaro [sonia.cristofaro at sorbonne-universite.fr]
Subject: SLE 2025 - Workshop: Reanalysis in cross-linguistic perspective: Theoretical and empirical implications


SLE 2025 - Workshop: Reanalysis in cross-linguistic perspective:
Theoretical and empirical implications

Date: 26-Aug-2025 - 29-Aug-2025
Location: Bordeaux, France

Call for Papers:
WORKSHOP:  `Reanalysis in cross-linguistic perspective: Theoretical
and empirical implications', to be held at the next SLE Conference,
Bordeaux, France, 26-29 August 2025
Convenors: Sonia Cristofaro (Sorbonne Université), Andrej Malchukov
(Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz)
The concept of reanalysis has been the subject of several well-known
controversies over the decades, with debate focusing, for example, on
the syntactic vs. semantic and pragmatic nature of reanalysis, its
gradual or abrupt character, the role of ambiguity,  or the
delimitation of reanalysis relative to other phenomena in language
change, such as grammaticalization and analogy (see Madariaga 2017 and
Detges et al. 2021 for comprehensive overviews). Despite these
controversies, there is general consensus in the literature that
reanalysis–broadly understood as a change in a user’s interpretation
of an existing construction, both at the structural and at the
functional level– plays a major role in the emergence of grammatical
structure cross-linguistically.
In particular, grammaticalization studies and other studies of
language change carried out from a cross-linguistic perspective have
shown that reanalysis is responsible for the development of new
grammatical structures in a wide variety of domains across languages,
including e.g. TAM, word order, nominal morphology, grammatical
relations, and clause combining (Givón 1979; Heine and Reh 1984;
Aristar 1991; Lord 1993; Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994; Harris and
Campbell 1995; Gildea 1998; Evans 2007; Creissels 2008; Malchukov
2008; Mithun 2008; Cristofaro 2016, 2023, 2024, among many others).
This research has gathered extensive cross-linguistic evidence about
the starting and endpoints of various processes involving reanalysis,
specifically the source constructions and the resulting structural and
functional changes (see, for example, Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca
1994; Heine, Claudi, and Hünnemeyer 1991; Hopper and Traugott 2003;
Lehmann 2015; Bisang and Malchukov 2017, 2020; Heine et al. 2019).
However, as noted by several scholars (Diewald 2006, Garrett 2011,
Petré and Van de Velde 2018), comparatively less attention has been
devoted to the specific mechanisms driving these changes.
In many cases, reanalysis has been argued to ultimately originate from
a process of form-meaning redistribution that occurs during language
use as the relevant constructions are reinterpreted due to
context-induced inferences (Gildea 1998; Croft 2000; Hopper and
Traugott 2003; Eckardt 2006; Detges and Waltereit 2002; Moosegard
Hansen 2021, among others). These inferences broadly fall into two
types, sometimes referred to as metonymization and generalization
(Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994; Traugott and Dasher 2005). In
metonymization, the relevant forms are inferred to encode a meaning
originally associated with a co-occurring element or the overall
context. In generalization some component of their origi1nal meaning
is inferred to be the main meaning as other meaning components are
deprofiled.
For other scholars (Fischer 2007; De Smet 2009, 2012), reanalysis is
better understood as a result of analogical influence, where
particular constructions are given a novel interpretation based on
patterns from other constructions in the language. Yet another
mechanism is chunking–the loss of the boundaries within elements
within a construction, leading for example to affixes being
reinterpreted as part of the stem, the development of affixation, or
the emergence of phrase structure (see e.g. Bybee 2001, 2007; Beckner
and Bybee 2009).
These mechanisms have been proposed based on specific, often
well-known cases of reanalysis. However, for most instances of
reanalysis that have been described in the literature–both in
grammaticalization studies and elsewhere– they have not been discussed
in detail or compared, and there is generally no investigation of the
specific factors that may have triggered them in individual languages.
For instance, metonymization and generalization are commonly assumed
to be related to the relative communicative relevance or contextual
prominence of different meaning components within the source
construction, which may lead to a form-meaning redistribution (Bybee,
Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994, among others). Yet, these factors are
often not explored for individual source constructions, nor is the
role of other potential triggers for reanalysis, such as the possible
analogical influence of other constructions in the language, the
relative discourse frequency of the source construction (in regard
both to metonymization and generalization, and chunking), or prosodic
factors, which have been argued to play a critical role in affixation
and the emergence of phrase structure (Himmelmann 2014, 2022).
The aim of the workshop is to foster reflection on the factors that
may trigger reanalysis across languages, with particular focus on two
general research issues:
(i) The elaboration of a comprehensive typology of these factors. This
would make it possible to systematically compare different instances
of reanalysis across languages, to further address yet unresolved
question such as the scope of reanalysis with respect to other
phenomena (analogical extension, grammaticalization), and to formulate
hypotheses about why reanalysis takes place or fails to take place
under similar conditions in different languages. While research on
specific factors triggering reanalysis may be difficult in the absence
of corpus evidence (particularly evidence from historical corpora),
examination of these factors for languages where such evidence is
available may point to new ways to investigate these factors in other
languages as well.
(ii) The potential implications of reanalysis for the explanation of
recurrent cross-linguistic patterns. In classical typological
explanations of these patterns, particular constructions recurrently
occur cross-linguistically because they comply with functional
principles, such as economy or processing ease (see, e.g., Croft 2003;
Hawkins 2014; Haspelmath 2021). However, these constructions often
develop through reanalysis, and the mechanisms involved in reanalysis
are not usually explained in terms of such principles. Instead, they
are generally assumed to be related to properties of the source
construction, e.g. contextual properties leading to particular
inferences, relationship with other 2constructions, or repetition and
automatization of the construction (leading to chunking). This
suggests that the development and cross-linguistic distribution of the
resulting constructions are ultimately motivated by these properties,
rather than the assumed functional principles (Bybee 2008; Cristofaro
2019, among several others).
 We especially welcome typologically oriented contributions on the
following topics:
• Language-specific and cross-linguistic investigation of the factors
driving reanalysis, including empirical ways to test the role of these
factors.
• Ways to compare instances of reanalysis across languages, b in
regard to bothterminology and analytical parameters.
• Novel paths of reanalysis from lesser-known languages.
• Implications of reanalysis for classical functional principles
pertaining to the synchronic properties of the resulting
constructions, such as economy or processing ease. Can these
principles still be assumed to play a role in the emergence and
cross-linguistic distribution of these constructions, or does
reanalysis point to different explanations for these phenomena?
Guidelines for abstract submission
Abstracts (not exceeding 500 words, excluding references) should be
submitted via EasyChair using the following link:
https://societaslinguistica.eu/members/login/. For submission
guidelines, please refer to the SLE call for papers and the FAQ page
(https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2025/third-call-for-papers/). When
submitting your abstract, please select the title of the workshop.
The deadline for abstract submission in EasyChair is 15 January 2025.
Please note that submitters must be SLE members to submit an abstract.
For SLE membership, visit: https://societaslinguistica.eu/membership.
Abstracts will be reviewed by two members of the SLE 2025 Programme
Committee and the workshop convenors.
If you are submitting additional papers to the SLE conference, please
note that one person may be the first author of only one submission of
any kind (workshop paper, general session paper, poster, or workshop
proposal). Co-authoring more than two papers is allowed.
References
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Beckner, C. and J. Bybee (2009). A usage-based account of constituency
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Bisang, W. and A. Malchukov (Eds.) (2017). Unity and diversity in
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