36.2912, Confs: Workshop at ALT2026: Incorporating the Spoken Signal Into Grammatical Typology (France)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-36-2912. Tue Sep 30 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.2912, Confs: Workshop at ALT2026: Incorporating the Spoken Signal Into Grammatical Typology (France)

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Date: 29-Sep-2025
From: Naomi Peck [naomi.peck at linguistik.uni-freiburg.de]
Subject: Workshop at ALT2026: Incorporating the Spoken Signal Into Grammatical Typology


Workshop at ALT2026: Incorporating the Spoken Signal Into Grammatical
Typology

Date: 01-Jul-2026 - 03-Jul-2026
Location: Lyon, France
Meeting URL: https://alt-2026.sciencesconf.org/

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Typology

Submission Deadline: 15-Oct-2025

Workshop at the 16th International Conference of the Association for
Linguistic Typology
Convenors: Laura Becker (University of Freiburg) & Naomi Peck
(University of Freiburg)
Workshop Description:
The Written Bias in Typology
Most languages are primarily spoken, with only a minority of languages
or speaker communities developing a writing system. We can estimate
that less than 10% of all languages spoken today have developed
writing to the extent that they have a literary tradition, with the
other 90% being exclusively spoken or written to a much lesser extent
(Ong 1982: 7). Despite the primacy of the spoken mode for language,
most work on grammar has relied upon the study of written
representations, with typology being no exception. The information on
grammatical structures needed for a typological study is usually
extracted from transcribed examples in reference grammars or taken
from a typological database such as WALS or Grambank, which are based
on written resources of languages themselves. Even typological or
cross-linguistic studies that use corpus data often have to rely on
written records, given that most cross-linguistic corpus collections
(such as the Universal Dependency treebanks) are based on compilations
of written data.
Evidence for the Spoken Signal Affecting Grammar:
Despite the general reliance on written data, typologists have begun
to seriously consider the impact of the spoken signal on grammar. Two
notable long-term projects, MultiCAST (Haig & Schnell 2021) and DoReCo
(Seifart et al. 2024), have compiled annotated and time-aligned
crosslinguistic spontaneous speech corpora, providing invaluable
resources for typological corpus studies that consider phonetic and
prosodic information for grammatical analysis.
Several typological studies have investigated phonetic properties in
relation to grammar with spontaneous speech data from typologically
distinct languages. A number of studies explored how phone duration
helps to segment the continuous speech signal. Seifart et al. (2021)
show that words are systematically lengthened in utterance-final
positions across languages. Similarly, Blum et al. (2024) find that
consonant lengthening marks the beginning of words. Furthermore, we
have direct evidence for grammatical systems being sensitive to
durational effects. Seifart et al. (2018) show that nouns slow down
speech compared to verbs, and Becker (submitted) confirms that
high-frequency grammatical markers are phonetically shortened compared
to phonologically comparable but less frequent markers in the world’s
languages.
Similarly, we have evidence that prosody interacts with grammatical
structure, especially when it comes to prosodic boundaries and
intonation units. For instance, Mettouchi (2018) argues that prosodic
integration is key to understanding grammatical relations in Kabyle
(Afro-Asiatic). More broadly, Himmelmann (2014, 2022) argues that
prosodic boundaries constrain how separate linguistic elements can
coalesce phonologically and become grammatical units. This is
supported by Peck & Becker (2024), who revealed complex interactions
between syntactic boundaries and silent pauses. Similarly, Reinöhl &
Casaretto (2018) use evidence from prosodic unithood in historical
poems to explain the absence of potential grammaticalization processes
in Modern Indo-Aryan languages.
Aim of the Workshop:
In this workshop, our aim is to bring together typologists who explore
how the unique properties associated with the spoken signal are
related to grammatical structures across languages. Our objective is
to gain a better understanding of how phonetic and prosodic properties
interact with other levels of grammatical structures, how they can
affect language change and grammaticalization, and what methods we
have and need to study the effect of the spoken signal on grammar from
a typological perspective.
Topics of the Workshop:
Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
 - empirical investigations of spoken language phenomena in relation
to grammar (crosslinguistic studies, single language studies, both
experimental or corpus-based)
 - explorations of the interaction of suprasegmental properties (e.g.
tone, stress, pitch) and spoken language processes (e.g. pausing,
durational modulation) with grammar
 - explanations for grammatical phenomena which rely on properties of
the spoken signal
 - methodological reflections on how we can incorporate properties of
the spoken signal in synchronic and/or diachronic studies
 - methodological investigations on how our practices of writing
spoken data influence typological analyses
Submissions to the workshop should be sent through via the open call
for papers for ALT 2026. Please make sure that you include the
workshop title as part of your abstract underneath your title if you
wish your talk to be part of the workshop. Feel free to get in touch
with the convenors if you wish to check whether your contribution will
fit in with the theme of the workshop.
References:
Becker, Laura. Submitted. Frequency effects in verbal argument
indexing: A spoken typology approach. Language.
Blum, Frederic, Ludger Paschen, Robert Forkel, Susanne Fuchs & Frank
Seifart. 2024. Consonant lengthening marks the beginning of words
across a diverse sample of languages. Nature Human Behaviour. 1–12.
Haig, Geoffrey & Stefan Schnell. 2021. Multi-CAST: Multilingual corpus
of annotated spoken texts.
Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 2014. Asymmetries in the prosodic phrasing of
function words: Another look at the suffixing preference. Language
90(4). 927–960.
Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 2022. Prosodic phrasing and the emergence of
phrase structure. Linguistics 60(3). 715–743.
Mettouchi, Amina. 2018. The interaction of state, prosody and linear
order in Kabyle (Berber): Grammatical relations and information
structure. In Mauro Tosco (ed.), Afro-Asiatic: Data and perspectives,
261–285. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Ong, Walter J. 1982. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the
Word. New York: Methuen.
Peck, Naomi & Laura Becker. 2024. Syntactic Pausing? Re-examining the
associations in spontaneous speech data. Linguistics Vanguard 10(1).
223–237.
Reinöhl, Uta & Antje Casaretto. 2018. When grammaticalization does NOT
occur: Prosody-syntax mismatches in Indo-Aryan. Diachronica 35(2).
238–276.
Seifart, Frank, Ludger Paschen & Matthew Stave (eds.). 2024. Language
Documentation Reference Corpus (DoReCo) 2.0. Lyon.
Seifart, Frank, Jan Strunk, Swintha Danielsen, Iren Hartmann, Brigitte
Pakendorf, Søren Wichmann, Alena Witzlack-Makarevich, Nikolaus P.
Himmelmann & Balthasar Bickel. 2021. The extent and degree of
utterance-final word lengthening in spontaneous speech from 10
languages. Linguistics Vanguard 7(1). 20190063.
Seifart, Frank, Jan Strunk, Swintha Danielsen, Iren Hartmann, Brigitte
Pakendorf, Søren Wichmann, Alena Witzlack-Makarevich, Nivja H. de Jong
& Balthasar Bickel. 2018. Nouns slow down speech across structurally
and culturally diverse languages. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences 115(22). 5720–5725.



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