37.2578, Confs: Panel at IPC20: Emancipating Grammatical Concepts From English and Indo-european Languages (Finland)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-2578. Wed Aug 05 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.2578, Confs: Panel at IPC20: Emancipating Grammatical Concepts From English and Indo-european Languages (Finland)

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Date: 05-Aug-2026
From: Yoshi Ono [tono at ualberta.ca]
Subject: Panel at IPC20: Emancipating Grammatical Concepts From English and Indo-european Languages


Panel at IPC20: Emancipating Grammatical Concepts From English and
Indo-european Languages
Short Title: IPC20
Theme: Building Bridges

Date: 27-Jun-2027 - 02-Jul-2027
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Meeting URL: https://pragmatics.international/page/IPC20Helsinki

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Language Documentation;
Pragmatics; Text/Corpus Linguistics; Typology

Submission Deadline: 15-Oct-2026

Standard grammatical concepts such as agreement, case, subject, direct
object, phrases, clauses, and sentences are predominantly derived from
the study of dominant Indo-European languages, including Latin, Greek,
German, and English. It raises a crucial question: how can we ensure
that these concepts are suitable for analyzing languages from
different language families? A brief examination of representative
non-Indo-European languages reveals significant differences compared
to languages like English (e.g., Japanese v.s. English clauses). Some
studies based on conversational data have begun to address this issue
(e.g., Ewing 2021; Laury, Ono, and Suzuki 2021). Moreover, the
influence of dominant languages and cultures on research in
non-Western and non-US contexts has been highlighted recently both
within and outside of linguistics (see Haspelmath 2023 for typology;
Labrune 2024 for phonology; Otani et al. 2025 for general linguistics;
Igarashi 2025 for sociology).
We propose organizing a cross-linguistic panel that focuses on
grammatical concepts in the analysis of conversational data,
challenging the straightforward application of standard concepts. Our
goal is not to dismiss these traditional concepts. Instead, we aim to:
1) evaluate their appropriateness for analyzing the languages
represented in the panel, 2) identify any shortcomings they may have,
and 3) explore alternative concepts for analyzing these languages. We
focus on both structure and use. We aim to consider how our findings
may inform future efforts in relevant areas, including language
documentation, contrastive analysis, typology, and universals.
We encourage you to submit an abstract for participation in the panel.
Our objective is to feature data from conversation in languages with
diverse genetic, typological, and regional characteristics, and to
include both junior and senior scholars from various parts of the
world.
Researchers working on Finnish, Indonesian, Japanese, Mandarin, Mano
(Mande), Ryukyuan, Xibe (Tungusic), and Tibeto-Burman languages have
so far shown interest in participating in our panel.



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