[Ura-list] CFP: Typology of Uralic

[Johanna Laakso]

from Gerson Klumpp:



Typology of Uralic languages: towards better comparability
 
Workshop at the 49th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea
Naples, 31 August – 3 September, 2016

Workshop organizers:
Gerson Stefan Klumpp (Tartu)   klumpp at ut.ee
Lidia Federica Mazzitelli (Bremen)  lidia.mazzitelli at uni-bremen.de
Fedor Rozhanskiy (Tartu)   handarey at yahoo.com

Call deadline: November 15, 2015
 
It is well known that Uralic studies have a long established tradition that developed on the base of historical linguistics. Many disciplines that play an essential role in contemporary linguistics (e.g. phonology and typology) are younger than Uralistics, and integration between the study of Uralic languages and contemporary linguistic disciplines is often not sufficient. Consequently, Uralic studies have at least two weak sides:
a. A lack of contemporary synchronic grammars based on modern linguistic theory that can be used by typologists. An obvious illustration can be found in WALS: most of the Uralic grammars used in the WALS project are crucially outdated, cf. (Ariste 1968 (in fact 1948)) for Votic; (Bubrix 1949, Lytkin 1966) for Komi-Zyrian; (Ristinen 1960, Kovedjaeva 1966) for Mari; (Sjögren 1861, Laanest 1982) for Livonian, etc.
b. Many grammars of Uralic languages follow the old-style tradition that can be specific for a particular language. The degree of comparability between Uralic grammars is very low. Compare for example the use of the term Accusative as the case of the direct object in Finnish tradition with the Estonian tradition of using the Nominative and Genitive for the same function.
These weak sides have been realized by many researchers, and gave rise to new approaches and a recent “renovation” of Uralic studies. New contemporary grammars are being published (Winkler 2001, Siegl 2013, Nikolaeva 2014, Wilbur 2015). Considerably more attention has been paid to typology, compare the recently published typologically oriented volume “Negation in Uralic languages” (Miestamo, Tamm & Wagner-Nagy 2015), and two typological projects – “Uralic Essive” (De Groot 2013) and “Oxford Guide to Uralic languages” (directed by M. Bakró-Nagy, J. Laakso & E. Skribnik) – that are currently in progress.
 
The current workshop aims at bringing together linguists working on Uralic languages from the position of modern linguistic theory and typology. The main goal of the workshop is to increase the level of comparability of the Uralic languages, and to promote the integration of Uralic studies into contemporary linguistics. The workshop also aims at stimulating the dialogue between researchers of Uralic languages working on different language levels: phonetics and phonology, morphology, and syntax.
The questions to be addressed in individual talks include (but are not restricted to) the following:
 
1. The sounds of Uralic languages from the point of view of modern phonological and prosodic studies;
2. Phonology-morphology interface in the Uralic languages.
3. Revisiting morphological and syntactic categories of the Uralic languages.
4. New approaches to morphological and morphophonological studies of the Uralic languages.
5. Argument structure and DOM/DSM in the Uralic languages.
6. Questions of word order and information structure in the Uralic languages.
 
Preference will be given to papers that compare several Uralic languages or dialects and aim at a uniform description of the data and promoting comparability. We also welcome papers addressing a particular language that offer new approaches to data interpretation in light of the contemporary linguistics, as well as papers engaging in comparing one or more Uralic languages with their neighbouring language(s).
 
We invite 20 minutes presentations (+ 8 minutes for discussion). Preliminary abstracts (300 words, DOC and/or PDF) should be sent to ALL the workshop organizers (see the addresses above) by November 15, 2015.


References
 
Ariste, Paul. 1968. A Grammar of the Votic Language. (Indiana University Publications, Uralic and Altaic Series 68) Indiana University Press.
Bubrix, Dmitrij V. 1949. Grammatika literaturnogo komi jazyka. Leningrad: Leningrad State University.
De Groot, Casper. 2013. The typology of Uralic essive. Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology 2/2, 119-123.
Kovedjaeva Evgenija I. 1966. Marijskij jazyk. In Lytkin, V. I. and Majtinskaja, K. E. (eds.), Jazyki narodov SSSR. Volume 3: Finno-ugorskie i samodijskie jazyki. Moscow / Leningrad: Nauka: 221-240.
Laanest, Arvo. 1982. Einführung in die ostseefinnischen Sprachen. Hamburg: Buske.
Lytkin, Vasilij I. 1966. Komi-zyrjanskij jazyk. In Lytkin, V. I. and Majtinskaja, K. E. (eds.), Jazyki narodov SSSR. Volume 3: Finno-ugorskie jazyki i samodijskie jazyki. Moskva: Nauka. 281-299.
Miestamo, Matti; Tamm, Anne & Wagner-Nagy, Beáta. 2015. Negation in Uralic Languages. (Typological Studies in Language, 108) Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Nikolaeva, Irina. 2014. A grammar of Tundra Nenets.  <http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/18452/>(Mouton Grammar Library 65) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Ristinen, Elaine K. 1960. An East Cheremis Phonology. (Indiana University Publications, Uralic and Altaic Series 1) Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Siegl, Florian. 2013. Materials on Forest Enets, an Indigenous Language of Northern Siberia. (SUST 267) Helsinki: SUS.
Sjögren, Johan A. 1861. Livische Grammatik nebst Sprachproben. St. Petersburg: Commisionare der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften.
Wilbur, Joshua. 2015. A grammar of Pite Saami. (Studies in Diversity Linguistics 5) Berlin: Language Science Press.
Winkler, Eberhard. 2001. Udmurt. München: Lincom Europa.


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