Workshop on Sign Linguistics, February 2004

[Pfau, R.]

Call for abstracts


We hereby invite the submission of abstracts for a workshop on

"Sign Languages: A cross-linguistic perspective"

to be held at the Annual Meeting of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) 2004.


Location: Mainz (Germany)
Date: February 25-27, 2004.
Organizers:     Pamela Perniss (MPI Nijmegen)
        Roland Pfau (University of Amsterdam)

Call deadline: July 31st, 2003


Goal of the workshop
The goal of the workshop is to bring together sign researchers who conduct comparative research on grammatical phenomena in different sign languages in order to investigate and discuss typological variation across sign languages.

Comparison of sign languages with spoken languages has yielded many fruitful results. On the one hand, it was shown that the grammatical structures are strikingly similar, on the other hand interesting modality effects have also been revealed. 
We are convinced, however, that it is of crucial importance to compare sign languages with each other in order to gain better insights into the structures of sign languages in their own right. The expectation is that sign languages, just like spoken languages, are typologically different from each other. In this context, it is also worth investigating whether typological variation is observed along similar lines as in spoken languages and/or whether we find significantly different clusterings along a typological continuum.

Usually, in the literature, the similarities between sign languages are highlighted. The grammatical similarities are indeed striking (e.g. phonotactic constraints, realisation of agreement, wh-questions) and it has been claimed that they are due to the language modality. Recent research, however, also points to interesting differences (e.g. position of functional categories, negation, plural marking).

This workshop aims to bring together linguists who investigate the grammatical structure of various sign languages in order to ascertain and discuss further phonological, morphological, and syntactic similarities and differences. The results of such investigations have important implications for our understanding of the question of universals of language and cognition and of typological variation, in general. 

We hope that the different theoretical backgrounds of the organizers will ensure a forum for discussion at the workshop that is balanced between various theoretical approaches to linguistics. 


Structure of the workshop
Depending on the content of a given abstract and the clustering of topics, both 30 minutes and 60 minutes time slots will be available.
Note that the 60 minutes slots are designed to accommodate joint presentations by researchers working on similar topics in different sign languages. We thus encourage researchers to collaborate in advance of the conference. 

Possible topics may include, but are not restricted to:
*       verb agreement
*       classifiers and classifier constructions 
*       iconicity in lexicon and grammar
*       wh-questions
*       negation
*       number and quantification / plural-marking
*       narrative and information structure
*       discourse markers
*       use of non-manuals


Submission
All abstracts should be submitted by e-mail as attachments to both organizers (pamela.perniss at mpi.nl <mailto:pamela.perniss at mpi.nl> and r.pfau at uva.nl <mailto:r.pfau at uva.nl>), specifying 'abstract' in the subject line. The following information should be contained in the body of the e-mail message:

- author's name(s)
- title of abstract
- affiliation
- e-mail address
- postal address

Abstracts should be anonymous and be either in .doc or .pdf formats. Abstracts should not exceed two pages (font size 12) including examples, figures, and references.


Deadline for submission of abstracts is July 31st, 2003.
Notification of acceptance: August 31st, 2003


Information about the conference will be posted at:
www.uni-mainz.de/dgfs2004


We are looking forward to receiving your abstracts!

Pamela Perniss & Roland Pfau

*************************
Pamela Perniss, Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, 
Wundtlaan 1, 6525 XD Nijmegen, The Netherlands, 
pamela.perniss at mpi.nl

Roland Pfau, Dept. of Linguistics, University of Amsterdam, 
Spuistraat 210, 1012 VT Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 
r.pfau at uva.nl
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