2023 Jun, 21
REPORTED DISCOURSE WITHIN GRAMMAR : CROSS-LINGUISTIC INSIGHTS
This workshop aims at bringing together researchers working on various aspects of reported discourse in different languages.
It is organized by the ERC-funded project “Discourse Reporting in African Storytelling” (http://discoursereporting.huma-num.fr/index.html) and follows up on two previous workshops (http://discoursereporting.huma-num.fr/workshops.html).
The international workshop will begin on Wednesday, July 5 and end on Friday, July 7
The abstract submission is done on the website: https://rdwg.sciencesconf.org/index/unauthorized
Deadline for abstracts: 31 March 2023
Notification of acceptance: 16 April 2023
Registration: 16 April – 30 June 2023
For more information – registration, accommodation and other details – please visit the website: https://rdwg.sciencesconf.org/.
Contact : rdwg2023@gmail.com
For any urgent issue, you can also contact Songfolo Lacina Silué: songfololacina@gmail.com or Tatiana Korol: bomolopuu@gmail.com
ORGANIZING AND SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEES
Organising Committee
Songfolo Lacina Silué (INALCO-LACITO ; Chair)
Tatiana Korol (LACITO-CNRS)
Anissa Forget (LACITO-CNRS)
Chika Kennedy Ajede (INALCO-LLACAN)
Lora Litvinova (INALCO-LLACAN)
Scientific Committee
Daniela Casartelli (University of Helsinki)
Denys Teptiuk (University of Tartu)
Izabela Jordanoska (LACITO-CNRS)
Songfolo Lacina Silué (INALCO-LACITO)
Tatiana Nikitina (LACITO-CNRS)
2023 Jun, 21
HUMANS AND NON-HUMANS IN AFRICAN VERBAL ARTS
Narrativity and environmental poetics at the dawn of the climate crisis
The recent reports on the consequences of global warming by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) once again urged industrial societies to change their relationship to the planet. Released in September 2019, August 2021 and February 2022[1], at the same time as the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, these reports reinforce the multiple voices of researchers and environmental activists calling institutions and enterprises to take responsibility for climate change. The data on climate change and the danger for the survival of humans, animals and the environment – which gave rise to the slogan “There is no Planet B” – make us understand the urgency of taking action. It is pivotal to steer contemporary economies towards an ecological and social reconversion, including the drastic reduction in the exploitation of the world and its people, and the recovery of the ecosystems. Legal litigations on the conflicts of economic, environmental and social interests are growing and those responsible for eco-disasters are being challenged. It seems that a turning point has been reached with the condemnation in May 2021 of Shell for polluting the Nigerian Niger-Delta region and that of the French state in February 2021 for inactivity in counteracting climate change. To stick with an animal metaphor, it is important to remember that “a tiger does not change its stripes” and that the conversion to sustainability by industries and states may prove ephemeral and inconclusive, all the more so in a war situation like the one that started in Eastern Europe in 2022.
However, the ‘colonial’ approach to the world, due to those who think they are “masters and possessors of nature” in the words of Descartes and leading to the depletion of resources perceived as unlimited, is neither shared by all nor of all times. The songs of the Lamal ritual among the Samburu of Kenya[2], as well as the tale of the over-skilled hunter of the Serer of Senegal, for example, direct the narrative towards a relationship with living beings and geophysical forces and objects that is distant from the “devouring” attitude towards the world in the Cartesian words. How can such oral narratives make sense in the context of current environmental concerns? Should we rethink the often-allegorical analyses (Iheka 2018) of the past on the geo/zoo/etho/biological elements of oral and written literatures? What inspiration can oral literature provide for the renewal of African literary studies on the relationship between literature and the natural environment? And what inspiration for discourses and practices of industrial societies in Africa and elsewhere in the face of the present climate crisis?
Since the 1990s, ecocriticism and ecopoetics, the latter emphasising the literary aesthetics linked to ecological matters, have focused on environmental issues in literature. We can say that the new directions of criticisms pay increased attention to narratives that question and decentralize anthropocentric thinking. Such narratives rearticulate the nature/culture relationship and the notions of otherness and of the ‘wilderness’ of nature as well, all too firmly posited by previous philosophical thinking as well as by the structuralist approaches of the 1960s-1980s (e.g. Barry 2009, Descola 2011, Garnier 2022, Ijeka 2018, Iovino and Oppermann 2012, Schoentjes 2015, Posthumus 2013, etc.). Though rooted in written productions, ecopoetics is beginning to open up to orality and its functioning in the lived experience of environments: sounds, colours and movements, the sensitive attention paid to places and relationships, and the knowledge that is constructed there (Bourlet, Lorin and Morand 2020). [3]
The theme for the 14th Isola Conference – “Humans and Non-Humans in African Verbal Arts: Narrativity and Environmental Poetics at the Dawn of the Climate Crisis” – proposes to investigate oral literatures in Africa and the Diaspora from the perspective of multiple approaches that place the relationship between the verbal arts and the environment at the centre of the research.
Please visit the conference website for all other information pertaining to the 2023 conference: https://isola-14.sciencesconf.org.
Contact address : isola.conference14@gmail.com
Conference will start Wednesday 5th July at 1pm and will end Friday 7th with the gala dinner.
ORGANIZING AND SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEES
Organising Committee
Sandra Bornand (LLACAN, CNRS-INALCO)
Hermelind Le Doeuff, PhD student (LACITO, CNRS-Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Philippe Glâtre, PhD student (LACITO, CNRS-Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Cécile Leguy (LACITO, CNRS-Sorbonne Nouvelle-INALCO)
Daniela Merolla (LACNAD, INALCO)
Katell Morand (Université Paris Nanterre, CREM-LESC)
Responsible for the conference for ISOLA: Akintunde Akinyemi, University of Florida, Gainesville (USA), Vice-President.
Scientific Committee
Akintunde Akinyemi (University of Florida, United States)
Elara Bertho (LAM, CNRS, France)
Julien Bondaz (Université Lumière Lyon 2, France)
Sandra Bornand (LLACAN, CNRS, France)
Alice Degorce (IMAF, IRD, France)
Xavier Garnier (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle & Institut universitaire de France)
Giovanni Gugg (Université « Federico II », Naples, Italie)
Benoît Hazard (IIAC, CNRS, France)
Éric Jolly (IMAF, CNRS, France)
Maëline Le Lay (THALIM, CNRS, France)
Cécile Leguy (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, France)
Christine Le Quellec-Cottier (Université de Lausanne, Suisse)
Tendai Mangena (Great Zimbabwe University, Zimbabwe)
Daniela Merolla (LACNAD, INALCO, France)
Katell Morand (Université Paris Nanterre/CREM-LESC, France)
Ghirmai Negash (Ohio University, United States)
Rose Opondo (Moi University, Eldoret, Kenya)
Annachiara Raia (Leiden University, Netherlands)
Paulette Roulon-Doko (LLACAN, CNRS, France)
Mohand Akli Salhi (Université Mouloud Mammeri, Tizi-Ouzou, Algeria)
Alain Sanou (Université Ki-Zerbo, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso)
Antoinette Tidjani Alou (Université Abdou Moumouni, Niamey, Niger)
Jacomien van Niekerk (University of Pretoria, South Africa)
Felicity Wood (University of Fort Hare, Alice, South Africa)
)
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)
References
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Bickel, B., Witzlack-Makarevich, A., Choudhary, K.K., Schlesewsky, M., & Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, I. 2015. The neurophysiology of language processing shapes the evolution of grammar. Evidence from case marking. PLoS ONE 8(10), DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0132819.
Bybee, J. L. 1985. Morphology: a study of the relation between meaning and form. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Du Bois, J. W. 1987. The discourse basis of ergativity. Language 63, 805–855.
Duranti, A. 1994. From grammar to politics. Linguistic anthropology in a Western Samoan village. Berkley, CA: University of California Press.
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Alexandre Gefen (dir.)
