Date: 31-Aug-2021 – 03-Sep-2021
Location: Athens, Greece
Contact Person: Senta Zeugin
 
Web Site: http://www.sle2021.eu/call-for-workshop-papers

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics; Morphology; Syntax

Language Family(ies): Romance

Call Deadline: 15-Nov-2020

Meeting Description:

Convenors: Senta Zeugin1, Albert Wall2, Philipp Obrist1, Johannes Kabatek1, Patrick Santos Rebelo1 (1Universität Zürich, 2Universität Wien)

Workshop description:
In the last decades, addressing linguistic issues by experiments has become an established practice in linguistic research. Nonetheless, experiments are significantly more common in certain areas of linguistics and in the study of certain languages. In this workshop, we propose to focus on linguistic fields and languages that only more recently have seen a surge in experimental studies, namely morpho-syntactic features in Romance.

While researchers have been prolific in applying and adapting experimental approaches to some languages, others lag behind. Germanic languages, English and German in particular, feature a wide range of different experimental studies, whereas significantly less work has been done on Romance. However, especially in more recent years, Romance languages are making up ground, and several topics have been addressed from an experimental point of view, e.g. different aspects of pronoun resolution (Demestre et al. 1999, de la Fuente & Hemforth 2013), Differential Object Marking (Nieuwland et al. 2013, Wall 2015 and Wall et al. 2020a on Spanish; Zeugin on Catalan; Montrul 2019 on Spanish and Romanian), or Bare Nouns (Wall 2014, Beviláqua et al. 2016). Other examples of morpho- syntactic features analysed in recent studies include clitic doubling (von Heusinger & Tigau 2019 on Romanian), subject omission (Soares et al. 2020 on Portuguese), leísmo (Rodríguez-Ordóñez on Spanish and Basque), as well as morphological processing (Crepaldi et al. 2014 for Italian) and issues at the syntax-information structure interface (Abeillé & Winckel 2019). This is but a small selection of morpho-syntactic features that can be studied via experimental methods and is by no means intended as a limitation for possible workshop papers. We also strongly encourage papers analysing several languages or dialects via parallel or comparable experiments (e.g. Ionin et al. 2011, Wall et al. 2020a & 2020b), thus providing a more robust basis for cross-linguistic comparison.

The aim of this workshop is to give visibility to these recent developments and to bring together the corresponding lines of research, deriving the greatest possible benefit of such a platform for researchers working on similar topics. Concentrating on Romance languages ensures a high degree of cross-linguistic comparability and transfer of insights, while at the same time offering a wide range of cross-linguistic variation of morpho-syntactic features to explore.

See http://www.sle2021.eu/call-for-workshop-papers for the full call for papers including references.

Call for papers:

We invite papers addressing one or several of the following questions:
– How can experimental methods inform linguistic theory?
– What are the advantages and best practices in the application of null hypothesis testing vs. exploratory data analysis?
– Are some methods more/less suited to the study of specific Romance morpho-syntactic features?
– What are the advantages of a combination of different experimental methods or of experimental and non-experimental methods?
– What is the potential of comparative/parallel studies applying experimental methods to several languages?

Possible topics include:
– Papers addressing one or several specific morpho-syntactic features
– Papers with a focus on one or several Romance languages (or Romance languages in contact with other languages)
– Papers combining different experimental methods or experimental and non- experimental methods in studying Romance morpho-syntactic features
– Experimental approaches with a comparative/variational focus
– Discussions of specific methodological aspects of experiments, e.g. experimental setup, Likert scales vs. magnitude estimation, statistical analysis of experimental data etc.

We invite you to submit preliminary abstracts (max. 300 words) for a 20-minutes presentation in PDF or word format to senta.zeugin(at)uzh.ch by 15-Nov-2020. If the workshop proposal is accepted, all selected participants will be invited to submit their full abstracts (max 500 words) to the general call for papers of SLE 21 before January 15 2021.