FW: a conference announcement.

[Rankin, Robert L]

This was sent to me, and probably to many of you, and I thought it might be interesting to the list.   Bob
 

Workshop

 

organised by

 

Hans Christian Luschützky and Franz Rainer

 

on

 

 

The polysemy of agent nouns

 

 

Call for papers

 

 

In many languages, the patterns used in the formation of agent nouns may also serve for the formation of instrumental, locative and other nouns (cf., e.g., the German nomina acti of the type Seufzer 'sigh', from seufzen 'to sigh'). It is generally believed that this polysemy is very wide-spread cross-linguistically and that its supposed ubiquity has been the result of independent processes of semantic extension, especially metaphor or metonymy. A closer look at the bibliography on this problem, however, reveals that both the typological and the diachronic part of this common belief are, up to now, underdetermined by the facts. On the one hand, studies about non-Indo-European languages are extremely rare. On the other, most studies about Indo-European are essentially synchronic in nature, and even if they are diachronic, they hardly ever give detailed information about when and how exactly the supposed semantic extension occurred. Some diachronic studies furthermore show that at least in some cases what looks like polysemy from a purely synchronic perspective must be attributed to other mechanisms (borrowing, loan-translation, homonymisation of formerly distinct patterns, ellipsis, or conversion) when subjected to a detailed diachronic analysis.

 

In our workshop, we would like to subject the (supposed) polysemy of agent nouns to closer scrutiny. All kinds of contributions capable of shedding new light on the problem are welcome in principle, but we would like to encourage particularly studies taking into account languages and language families that have been hitherto neglected as well as in-depth diachronic studies of individual languages.

 

Colleagues interested in participating in the workshop are invited to send a one-page abstract (preferably pdf) to one of the organizers before the end of December, 2005.

 

The workshop will take place during the International Morphology Meeting in Budapest.

 

hans.christian.luschuetzky at univie.ac.at                         franz.rainer at wu-wien.ac.at

 

Further details on the workshop will be available on H. Ch. Luschützky's homepage in due course: http://homepage.univie.ac.at/hans.christian.luschuetzky/