2024 Mar, 18
The choice of grammatical forms and constructions used for event descriptions, such as voice, differential case marking, or the realization of argument expressions, can be influenced by many different factors. One such factor is the internal organization of a text into what we call here ?(larger) discourse units?.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a number of works on the internal structure of discourse have been published (cf. Chafe 1980, Longacre 1979, van Dijk 1981) that investigate the syntax and semantics of so-called ?paragraphs? or ?episodes? in spoken and written language, i.e. units characterized as ?coherent sequences of sentences of a discourse, linguistically marked for beginning and/or end, and further defined in terms of some kind of ‘thematic unity’ ? for instance, in terms of identical participants, time, location or global event or action? (van Dijk 1981: 177). While in written language, discourse units are usually signalled graphically, in oral or signed speech such units are much less easily recognizable.
The workshop is based on a collaboration between the projects? Morphosyntax in Discourse? of the LABEX /Empirical Foundations in Language /in Paris (https://en.labex-efl.fr/) and ?Prominence-related structures in symmetrical voice systems and Papuan languages? of the Collaborative Research Centre /Prominence in Language/ in Cologne (https://sfb1252.uni-koeln.de/en/ <https://sfb1252.uni-koeln.de/en/>).
We hope to discover operationalizable methods for identifying larger discourse units with the help of semantic, lexical, grammatical and/or prosodic cues both in well-studied and in more recently documented languages. We are particularly interested in cues that so far have not been considered as being discourse boundary related such as differential case marking, specific voice constructions, etc. The workshop is meant as an opportunity for researchers from different theoretical backgrounds and with an expertise on typologically distinct languages to make further progress in the analysis of discourse data.
Dates:
Workshop dates: March 21st -22nd , 2024
Program:
For more information, here’s the link to the workshop presentation: https://units.sciencesconf.org/
Scientific Committee:
Isabelle Bril
Katharina Haude
Nikolaus P. Himmelmann
Sonja Riesberg
Fahime Same
2023 Jun, 2
Grammatical Relations in Spoken Language Corpora
Scholars with a broadly usage-oriented view on language share the idea that the linguistic structures encountered in human language systems arise from diachronic processes of language evolution that are in turn shaped by considerations of language processing, learning and usage (cf. e.g. Sinnemäki 2014 for an overview). Recent years have seen a steep rise in studies directly addressing issues of processing and learnability in relation to typological distributions of linguistic structures, e.g. in experimental studies from neuro- (Sauppe et al 2021; Bickel et al 2015) and psycholinguistics (Adamou 2017) as well as in artificial language learning experiments (Tal et al 2022; Mansfield et al 2022).
Corpus-based studies (of language usage by adult speakers) related to typological questions have a longer history within the functionalist tradition of linguistics associated with scholars like Wallace Chafe or Talmy Givón (and their associates and successors) as well as Zipf’s (1935) seminal work on frequency distributions and form-frequency correspondences. Larger-scale corpus studies of relevance for typology have examined in particular word order (Greenberg 1963; Dryer 1992; Futrell et al 2015, 2020; Levshina 2019) and marking asymmetries (Greenberg 1966; Levshina 2021; Haspelmath & Karjus 2014), taking efficiency as a core characteristic underlying language use as well as the design of human language systems (cf. Gibson et al 2019 for an overview). Yet, for the most part this work is based on corpora from larger languages (often with a literary tradition and official/standard status in at least one country), and largely on written corpora.
In this workshop we focus on the interrelation of grammatical relations as reflected in the structure of individual languages and their communicative underpinnings in discourse production, and we seek to bring together scholars with a primary focus on corpus-based work. We intend to broaden the perspective on the usage-oriented rationale behind specific structural aspects of grammatical relation systems. We hence seek corpus-based research that includes not only classic discourse-functional factors like topic marking and topic continuity (Givón 1976, 1983; Shibatani 1991) or the converse function of reference establishment (DuBois 1987; cf. Evans & Levinson 2009:440), but also structural (e.g. the interplay of person agreement and pronoun use, cf. Taraldsen 1980; Rosenkvist 2009, 2018; Schnell & Barth 2020), cultural, and social factors (e.g. use of ergative constructions in relation to the social role of speakers in Samoan, cf. Duranti 1994).
We furthermore restrict the purview of this workshop to spoken-language discourse as we see spoken language usage not only as the primary seedbed for the emergence of grammatical relations generally speaking (by way of its primordial form of usage of human languages) and specifically as containing those interactions between prosodic, syntactic and morphological structure that lie behind processes of univerbation and morphologization (Lehmann 2015 [1982]; Bybee 1985).
Invited speakers:
Linda Konnerth (University of Bern)
Henrik Rosenkvist (University of Gothenburg)
Organisers: Katharina Haude (Sedyl, CNRS), Eva van Lier (University of Amsterdam), Sonja Riesberg (LaCiTO, CNRS), Stefan Schnell (University of Zurich)
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