Date: 26-Aug-2020 – 29-Aug-2020
Location: Bucharest, Romania
Contact Person: Guglielmo Inglese
Meeting Email: < click here to access email >

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Syntax; Typology

Call Deadline: 10-Nov-2019

Meeting Description:

The middle voice is a grammatical domain whose complexity has long puzzled scholars, as it lies at the cross-roads between the grammatical domain of voice phenomena and the structure of the lexicon. In spite of the existing typological work on the topic, there is no systematic diachronic typology of this domain.

Cross-linguistic research on the middle voice has shown that from a synchronic standpoint middle voice systems (MVSs) typically feature a split distribution, to the extent that in individual languages middle markers (MMs) can act as valency changing markers with some verbs but also display an obligatory lexically specific distribution with others (see e.g. Kemmer 1993, Kazenin 2001, Kaufmann 2007). These two classes of verbs can be referred to as oppositional and non-oppositional middles.

Typical functions of oppositional middles include valency changing operations like anticausative, passive, reflexive, and reciprocal (cf. Zúñiga & Kittilä 2019). Non-oppositional middles show a consistent distribution across languages, as they tend to occur with a specific cluster of situation types, such as grooming verbs, verbs of change in body posture, and spontaneous events (cf. Kemmer 1993). Kemmer (1993) suggested that this distribution across grammatical functions and lexical classes is not random, and that the middle is “coherent but relatively diffused category that comprises a set of loosely linked semantic subdomains” (ibid.: 238), relating to the property of low degree of elaboration of events.
In spite of the existing synchronic typology, diachronic studies of the middle remain few, to the effect that nowadays there is no comprehensive diachronic typology of MVSs. Existing studies focus almost exclusively on the diachrony of individual valency changing functions (e.g. passives [Haspelmath 1990], anticausative [Haspelmath 1993], reflexives [König & Siemund 2000], reciprocals [Heine & Miyashita 2008], antipassives [Sansò 2017]). What is lacking in most of these studies is a careful consideration of how oppositional functions of MMs historically relate to non-oppositional ones. The mainstream view on the development of MMs maintains that there is a unidirectional path from oppositional to non-oppositional functions, with reflexives constituting one of the most frequent sources of MMs (cf. Kemmer 1993, Haspelmath 2003). However, the reverse scenario has also been found, i.e. MMs that start from a lexical distribution and later develop oppositional functions (cf. Dom et al. 2016 on Bantu, Inglese forthc. on Hittite). These and other findings call for a rethinking of the systematic diachronic typology of the middle voice domain.
The aim of the workshop is to bring together scholars working on the middle voice and related phenomena in a typological and diachronic perspective.

Possible topics to be addressed in the workshop include:

– documentation of previously undescribed MVSs;
– the development of individual MMs, with a focus on the historical relationship between oppositional and non-oppositional functions;
– corpus studies on the development of MMs in specific languages;
– the synchronic and diachronic relationship between MMs and competing constructions in individual languages;
– possible sources and processes of language change that may give rise to MMs;
– …

Call for papers:

We invite abstracts of max. 300 words. Please, send abstracts in an editable format (e.g. .docx) to:

– guglielmo.inglese01(at)universitadipavia.it
– andrea.sanso(at)uninsubria.it

The DEADLINE FOR THE SUBMISSION of the short abstract is NOVEMBER 10, 2019.

If the workshop will be accepted, you will also have to prepare a full abstract and submit it to be reviewed by the SLE scientific committee. The deadline for full abstracts is January 15, 2020.