36.2667, Confs: Workshop at ALT-2026: Diversity in Systemic Expansion and Contraction (France)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-36-2667. Mon Sep 08 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.2667, Confs: Workshop at ALT-2026: Diversity in Systemic Expansion and Contraction (France)

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Date: 06-Sep-2025
From: David Gyorfi [david.gyorfi at surrey.ac.uk]
Subject: Workshop at ALT-2026: Diversity in Systemic Expansion and Contraction


Workshop at ALT-2026: Diversity in Systemic Expansion and Contraction
Short Title: ALT-2026 workshop

Date: 01-Jul-2026 - 03-Jul-2026
Location: Lyon, France
Contact: David Gyorfi
Contact Email: david.gyorfi at surrey.ac.uk
Meeting URL: https://alt-2026.sciencesconf.org/resource/page/id/13

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Historical Linguistics;
Typology

Submission Deadline: 15-Oct-2025

16th International Conference of the Association for Linguistic
Typology
Diversity in Systemic Expansion and Contraction (WS2)
Workshop organizers: Oliver Bond and Dávid Győrfi
The grammatical systems of languages – such as case, gender or TAM
systems  – can vary considerably in terms of the core distinctions
they make (and the exponents thereof) even in closely related
languages. In the most striking cases, some family members have
systems that encode a handful of cross-linguistically familiar
categories, whereas the same systems in related varieties expand to
typologically unusual proportions. For instance, six auxiliaries
encoding TAM distinctions are observed in the 7th century Old Turkic
records; this increased to 19 auxiliaries in Kazakh and 28 in Uzbek,
yet Modern Standard Turkish has only five (Erdal 2004; Bodrogligeti
2002; Tulum 1997; Győrfi 2022; Göksel and Kerslake 2005; Gabain 1953).
Conversely, while we see a stable system of 7-8 nominal cases in many
Slavic languages, the Bulgarian case system gradually contracted to
only two (Wahlström 2015). What motivates the mass expansion or
contraction of grammatical systems?
Existing explanations for the expansion of grammatical systems
typically examine the development of new categories/feature values at
the level of the grammaticalisation of individual constructions
(Bybee, Perkins and Pagliuca 1994; Hopper and Traugott 2003; Narrog
and Heine 2011; Kuteva et al. 2019) or the analogical expansion of a
grammatical strategy (De Smet and Fischer 2017; Fischer 2011; Fischer
2008) but say much less about dependencies between existing and
emergent categories. While studies on grammatical niches have examined
some of the effects of competition within grammatical systems (Aronoff
2019; Aronoff 2016; Dale and Lupyan 2012), little is known about how
this plays out in the most expansive systems, what types of categories
emerge as systems grow beyond what is normally encountered, or what
motivations exist for their mass expansion. Available diachronic
evidence suggests that in some expansive systems, growth is
characterized by a period of rapid expansion following an S curve
(Ghanbarnejad et al. 2014; Blythe and Croft 2012) in which new
categories emerge, and are sometimes quickly lost, as the system grows
and reshapes (Győrfi and Bond, forthcoming). In Old Turkic, the
limited number of attested TAM expressions conveyed familiar
grammatical distinctions such as ‘perfective,’ ‘imperfective,’ and
‘habitual.’ In subsequent varieties, the newly introduced
constructions compete with existing ones, but instead of replacing
them, they develop into highly specific categories, such as
‘perfective: short duration’ or ‘imperfective: unidirectional change’
(Győrfi and Bond, forthcoming). The question remains open as to
whether these reflect language-specific developments or if the most
expansive grammatical systems reflect universal tendencies in terms of
their organization.
Similarly, a growing body of work has investigated the loss of
inflection over time (Sims-Williams and Enger 2020; Sims-Williams and
Baerman 2021), and attrition of grammatical distinctions through
language contact (Montrul and Yoon 2019; Schmitt 2019; Schmitt and
Sorokina 2024). With respect to the contraction of expansive systems,
Verkerk and Di Garbo (2022) investigated the erosion of the gender
system in northwestern Bantu languages. They propose that the gender
systems that have undergone the most significant erosion from the
extensive Proto-Bantu gender system have been restructured around
semantically transparent animacy contrasts. This suggests that the
contraction of expansive systems may, in part, be motivated by a
reduction in the opacity of the system. These observations prompt us
to consider whether the complexity of expansive systems diminishes
according to the same principles observed in smaller systems. Or is
the contraction of expansive systems driven by specific factors
related to the semantic organization or complexity inherent in larger
systems?
Exploring the ways in which expansive grammatical systems emerge and
contract provides a unique opportunity to understand patterns of
linguistic organization that are less well evidenced in more typical
systems.
Questions and Research Topics:
We are particularly interested in case studies of variation within a
single family, or cross-linguistic studies, where synchronic or
diachronic variation provides clues to the context in which expansion
is favoured, or where structured contraction or loss of large systems
can be observed.
We invite scholarly contributions, focusing on any linguistic
phenomenon, that address the following questions:
1. Can cross-linguistic patterns be established to describe
large-scale systemic expansion and contraction?
2. What types of categories appear in the most expansive systems?
3. Do these patterns of expansion or contraction correlate with
different typological profiles?
4. Are there specific conditions that can predict systemic expansion
or contraction?
5. Although some examples appear to have developed through analogy, is
this the sole mechanism driving such systemic expansion?
6. Expansion is sometimes described in terms of an S-curve,
characterized by a period of relatively rapid growth. However, is this
universally applicable?
7. What is the role of language contract in large-scale systemic
expansion and contraction?
Please, submit your anonymous, 1+1 page long abstract abstract by
October 15, 2025, as described at ALT's website:
https://alt-2026.sciencesconf.org/resource/page/id/2
References:
Aronoff, Mark. 2016. Competition and the lexicon. In Livelli di
Analisi e fenomeni di interfaccia. Atti del XLVII congresso
internazionale della società di linguistica Italiana, 39–52. Roma:
Bulzoni Editore.
Aronoff, Mark. 2019. Competitors and alternants in linguistic
morphology. Competition in inflection and word-formation 39–66.
https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02550-2_2.
Blythe, Richard A. and William Croft. 2012. S-Curves And The
Mechanisms Of Propagation In Language Change. Source: Language 88(2).
269–304.
Bodrogligeti, András. 2002. Modern Literary Uzbek: Part 1. München:
Lincom Europa.
Bybee, Joan, Revere Perkins and William Pagliuca. 1994. The Evolution
of Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World.
Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Dale, Rick and Gary Lupyan. 2012. Understanding the origins of
morphological diversity: The linguistic niche hypothesis. Advances in
complex systems 15(3/4). 1150017.
Erdal, Marcel. 2004. A grammar of Old Turkic. Vol. 3. Leiden, Boston,
Köln: Brill.
Fischer, Olga. 2008. On analogy as the motivation for
grammaticalization. Foundations of Language 32(2). 336–382.
Fischer, Olga. 2011. Grammaticalization as analogically driven change?
View(z) 18(2). 3–23.
Gabain, Annamarie von. 1953. Türkçede Fiil Birleşmeleri [Complex verbs
in Turkish]. TDAY-Belleten 1–28.
Ghanbarnejad, Fakhteh, Martin Gerlach, José M. Miotto and Eduardo G.
Altmann. 2014. Extracting information from S-curves of language
change. Journal of The Royal Society Interface 11(101). 20141044.
https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2014.1044.
Göksel, Aslı and Celia Kerslake. 2005. Turkish: A comprehensive
grammar. Oxon, New York: Routledge.
Győrfi, Dávid. 2022. Auxiliary Verb Constructions in Modern Spoken
Kazakh [PhD Thesis]. University of Surrey PhD Thesis.
https://doi.org/10.15126/thesis.900398.
Hopper, Paul J. and Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2003.
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Seongha Rhee. 2019. World Lexicon of Grammaticalization (Second
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Sims-Williams, Helen and Matthew Baerman. 2021. A Typological
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Wahlström, Max. 2015. Loss of case inflection in Bulgarian and
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