Fwd: LABEX EFL / Conf=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=E9rences_?=Zygmunt Frajzyngier/Semantic prerequisites for the typology of functional categories/ les 3, 10, 17 et 23 juin 2014.

Wed May 28 10:26:55 UTC 2014

 Le *Labex EFL* - Empirical Foundations of Linguistics - Sorbonne Paris
Cité est heureux de vous inviter aux quatre prochaines conférences que
donnera le *Professeur Zygmunt Frajzyngier* (University of Colorado at
Boulder, USA), sur le thème *'Semantic prerequisites for the typology of
functional categories'*  au Pôle des Langues et Civilisations de l'INALCO,
65 rue des Grands Moulins, 75013 Paris (Salle 5.05, de 14 à 16h), les *3,
10, 17 et 23 juin 2014*.

Le professeur Zygmunt Frajzyngier sera accueilli au laboratoire LLACAN
(Langage, Langues et Cultures d'Afrique Noire http://llacan.vjf.cnrs.fr/),
UMR 8135, pendant la durée de son séjour. Auteur de plusieurs grammaires de
langues tchadiques, de plusieurs ouvrages de linguistique générale et
typologique, et de nombreux articles, sa recherche est ancrée dans
l'analyse de langues peu décrites, et fondée sur un travail de terrain
intensif et régulier en Afrique. Son approche de la typologie, qu'il
qualifie lui-même de non-aprioristique, pose des questions fondamentales
concernant la comparabilité des langues, la nature des catégories
linguistiques, et le statut de la preuve en linguistique.

Pour en savoir plus: http://spot.colorado.edu/~frajzyng/index.html

Le cycle de conférences est intitulé *'Semantic prerequisites for the
typology of functional categories'*, il sera décliné en quatre conférences
suivant une progression logique, dont le résumé est donné ci-dessous.

The usual approach to the typology of functional categories has been to
start with categories well established in Indo-Europan languages and
proceed with the study of their presence or absence in other languages. The
aim of the proposed course (four lectures, based on a submitted book, see
also Frajzyngier 2013) is to develop theoretical and methodological
foundations for the typologies of functional categories. At the basis of
this approach are meanings actually encoded in grammatical systems of
individual languages rather than a fixed set of formal categories (Newmeyer
2007), basic meanings (Seiler 1995) or comparative concepts (Lazard 2004,
Haspelmath 2010). The proposed approach emerged as a result of empirical
research, including many seasons of fieldwork and laboratory work on
hitherto undescribed languages from various language families, including
Kwa, Chadic, Semitic, Bantu, Cushitic, and Omotic languages.  In addition
to theoretical foundations, the course will offer the empirical evidence
for the hypotheses pertaining to the theoretical concepts proposed; a
methodology for the discovery of meanings encoded in grammatical systems;
and a demonstration of an empirically based typology of the relationship
between predicate and noun phrases for selected languages.

*Lecture 1* *'Theoretical foundations of the proposed approach'*

This lecture will lay out the theoretical foundations for the proposed
approach. The fundamental concept of the proposed approach is that every
language has a semantic structure composed of functional domains,
subdomains, and individual grammaticalized meanings. The individual
grammaticalized meanings are described in relationship to other
grammaticalized meanings within the same domain. The formal means existing
in the language (Lecture 2) serve to encode the grammaticalized meaning.

*Lecture 2* '*A methodology for the discovery of grammaticalized meaning'*

A fundamental prerequisite for the discovery of meaning encoded in the
grammar is the discovery of all the formal means of the given language,
including lexical categories, inflectional morphology, linear orders
(Frajzyngier 2011) and other formal means described in Frajzyngier and Shay
2003. The discussion of formal means will constitute the first part of
lecture 2. The second part will discuss how to discover the meaning of
individual forms using the notion of functional domains and subdomains, and
using the methodology of distributional analysis, in particular the notions
of contrastive and complementary distribution. Elements that can occur
within the same formal unit, such as phrase, clause, etc. belong to
different functional domains and subdomains.

*Lecture 3 'Consequences of grammaticalized meanings for the forms of
utterances'*

A fundamental consequence of the encoding of meaning in the grammatical
system is that certain constructions are possible in some languages and not
possible in others. It will explain why certain constructions are possible
in some languages and impossible in others, something Construction Grammar
cannot explain. A case in point is the sentence  'He sneezed his tooth
right across town.' (Goldberg 1995: 6). I will also explain constraints on
lexical deployment, viz. why some lexical items can be inserted in some
constructions and not into others, again something that cannot be explained
by Construction Grammar. I will explain under what conditions a meaning
encoded in grammar can be realized by a variety of constructions. Finally,
the lecture will address the issue of the interaction of various functional
domains within the same clause or sentence, e.g. the interaction of the
coding of grammatical and/or semantic relations with the coding of
information structure.

*Lecture 4* *'A demonstration of a non-aprioristic typology with respect to
clausal structures*
Much of contemporary typologies of functional categories has clause as one
of its central themes. This lecture will provide a model for a typology of
clausal predications and associated semantic relations. The lecture will
demonstrate how to discover meanings encoded in clausal predications, how
to prove these meanings, and finally how to build a typology based on the
discovered meanings. A typology based on functions actually encoded in
individual languages allows us to explain why certain languages have
passive constructions and others do not. An extension of the proposed
approach to other functional domains contributes to the elucidation of one
of most important questions in linguistic typology, viz. why languages are
similar and why they are different.

*References*

Frajzyngier, Zygmunt. 2011. Les fonctions de l'ordre linéaire des
constituants. In *Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris*, 107:1,
7-37.

Frajzyngier, Zygmunt. 2013. Non-aprioristic typology as a discovery tool.
In *Functional-Historical Approaches to Explanation: In honor of Scott
DeLancey*, eds. Tim Thornes, Erik Andvik, Gwen Hyslop and Joana Jansen.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 3-25.

Frajzyngier, Zygmunt, and Erin Shay. 2003. *Explaining language structure
through systems interaction*. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins,

Goldberg, Adele. 1995. *Constructions: A construction grammar approach to
argument structure*. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Haspelmath, Martin. 2010. Comparative concepts and descriptive categories
in cross-linguistic studies. *Language* 86(3). 663-687.

Lazard, Gilbert. 2004. On the status of linguistics with particular regard
to typology. The *Linguistic Review* 21:389-411.

Newmeyer, Frederick J. 2007. Linguistic typology requires crosslinguistic
formal categories. *Linguistic Typology* 11.133-157.

      ----------------------------------------
Amina METTOUCHI
Directrice du laboratoire LLACAN (Chair of the LLACAN research laboratory)
Directrice d'Etudes en Linguistique berbère à l'EPHE (Professor of Berber
linguistics at EPHE)
http://aminamettouchi.linguanet.org/

Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes
IVe section, Sciences historiques et philologiques
Sorbonne
54, rue Saint-Jacques
CS 20525, 75005 Paris

Laboratoire CNRS LLACAN, http://llacan.vjf.cnrs.fr/
UMR 8135, 7, rue Guy Môquet - BP 8
94801 VILLEJUIF (France)
Tél : (33)1 49 58 38 18
Fax: (33)1 49 58 38 00

-- 
Jacqueline Vaissière, professeur Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
Laboratoire de Phonétique et de Phonologie
Membre Senior de l'Institut Universitaire de France (2010-2015)
Laboratoire d'excellence Empirical Foundations of Linguistics, directeur
19 rue des Bernardins
75005 Paris
Tel: 06 15 93 94 71

-- 

Prof. Jacqueline Vaissière
Membre Senior, Institut Universitaire de France
Laboratoire de Phonétique et de Phonologie (LPP), UMR7018 (
http://lpp.univ-paris3.fr), directeur
Laboratoire d'excellence Empirical Foundations of Linguistics (EFL),
Sorbonne Paris Cité, directeur
Ecole Doctorale ED268
Université Sorbonne Nouvelle et CNRS
ILPGA, 19 rue des Bernardins, 75005 Paris
tel: 06 15 93 94 71 (01 43 26 57 17: gestionnaire du laboratoire)

http://lpp.in2p3.fr/article.php3?id_article=325
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