Date: 10-Dec-2018 – 12-Dec-2018
Location: Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
Contact Person: Robert Mailhammer

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Historical Linguistics; Neurolinguistics; Psycholinguistics

Call Deadline: 30-Sep-2018

Meeting Description:

Organisers:
Robert Mailhammer (Western Sydney University)
Elena Smirnova (Université de Neuchâtel)

Explaining internal language change has been the Gordian Knot of historical linguistics. Traditional approaches to language change make no attempt to motivate events of change [1]. Theories that do address causes of internal language change have taken mainly one of two stances: either it is a by-product of language use or it is functional. Neither approach has so far provided conclusive proof for their views. Theories of the first kind have had some success in accounting for sound change [2], but perhaps less so in other domains of language. The main problem of functional theories has been that the relevant functional aim, such as local improvement [3], prototypicality [4] or economy [5], have somewhat subjective. However, in recent years work has targeted more tangible parameters: [6] explicitly names a reduction in cognitive processing costs a goal of language change, [7] does this implicitly by using learnability by algorithms as test “subjects”, [8] discusses evolutionary and game-based models. The availability of sophisticated methodology to investigate language processing, together with the availability and processability of large historical language corpora make it possible to develop approaches that examine connections between language processing and language change:

References:
[1] Hill, E. 2009. Die Präferenztheorie der historischen Phonologie aus junggrammatischer Perspektive. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 28, 231-263
[2] Solé, M. J. & D. Recasens (eds.). 2012. The Initiation of Sound Change. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
[3] Vennemann, Th. 1993. Language change as language improvement », in: Ch. Jones (ed.), Historical linguistics: Problems and perspectives, 319-344. London: Longman.
[4] Bybee J. (2010). Language, Usage and Cognition. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.
[5] Gelderen, E. v. 2004. Grammaticalization as Economy. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
[6] Hawkins, J.A. 2004. Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars. Oxford University Press
[7] Schaden, G. 2012. International Journal of Pragmatics 4. 261-292
[8] Deo, Ashwini. 2015. Annual Review of Linguistics 1. 179–197

Call for Papers:

We solicit papers in this workshop that ideally will discuss approaches that
– try to assess whether documented cases of language change follow a prefer structures with low processing costs;
– explore the connection between language processing and language change experimentally and/or theoretically;
– investigate the connection between language acquisition, processing and language change;
– investigate aspects of processing that could be relevant to language change and vice versa.

We are happy to announce the following confirmed speakers:

Brett Baker (The University of Melbourne)
Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky (University of South Australia)
Laurence Bruggeman (Macquarie University)
Rikke Bundgaard-Nielsen (Western Sydney University)
Matthias Schlesewsky (University of South Australia)

Abstracts for a 30-minute oral presentation in this workshop, which is part of the 2018 Annual Meeting of the Australian Linguistic Society, should be sent in PDF format (not exceeding 500 words excluding figures, tables and references) to R.Mailhammer@westernsydney.edu.au by 30 September 2018. Notifications of acceptance will sent by mid-October.