Sixth Edinburgh Symposium on Historical Phonology

Date: 04-Dec-2023 – 05-Dec-2023
Location: Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Contact Person: Pavel Iosad
Meeting Email: eshp-org@mlist.is.ed.ac.uk
Web Site: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/symposium-on-historical-phonology/eshp6/

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Phonology

Call Deadline: 31-Jul-2023

Meeting Description:

What do we need to consider in order to understand the innovation and propagation of phonological change, and to reconstruct past phonological states? The Sixth Edinburgh Symposium on Historical Phonology will offer an opportunity to discuss fundamental questions in historical phonology as well as specific analyses of historical data.

Call for Papers:

Our plenary speaker is:

* Shelece Easterday (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa).

The invited speaker will address foundational issues in the discipline over two one-hour slots, one on each day of the symposium, and there will be considerable time allocated to discussion.

We see historical phonology as the branch of linguistics which links phonology to the past in any way. Its key concerns are (i) how and why the phonology of languages changes in diachrony, and (ii) the reconstruction of past synchronic stages of languages’ phonologies. These are inextricably linked: we need to understand what the past stages of languages were in order to understand which changes have occurred, and we need to understand which kinds of changes are possible and how they are implemented in order to reconstruct past synchronic stages.

We define phonology, broadly, as that part of language which deals with the patterning of the units used in speech, and we see historical phonology as an inherently inter(sub)disciplinary enterprise. In order to understand (i) and (ii), we need to combine insights from theoretical phonology, phonetics, sociolinguistics, dialectology, philology, and, no doubt, other areas. We need to interact with the traditions of scholarship that have grown up around individual languages and language families and with disciplines like history, sociology and palaeography.

The kinds of questions that we ask include at least the following:

* Which changes are possible in phonology?
* What is the precise patterning of particular changes in the history of specific languages?
* How do changes arise and spread through communities?
* Are there characteristics that phonological changes (or particular types of changes) always show?
* What counts as evidence for change, or for the reconstruction of previous stages of languages’ phonologies?
* What kinds of factors can motivate or constrain change?
* Are there factors which lead to stability in language, and militate against change?
* To what extent is phonological change independent of changes that occur at other levels of the grammar, such as morphology, syntax or semantics?
* What is the relationship between the study of completed phonological changes and of variation and change in progress?
* What is the relationship between phonological change and (first and second) language acquisition?
* What types of units and domains, at both segmental and prosodic levels, do we need in order to capture phonological change?
* How can the results of historical phonology inform phonological theorising?
* How does phonologisation proceed — how do non-phonological pressures come to be reflected in phonology?
* How can contact between speakers of different languages, or between speakers of distinct varieties of the same language, lead to phonological change, or to the creation of new phonological systems?
* How has historical phonology developed as an academic enterprise?

We invite one-page abstracts addressing these, or any other questions relevant to the symposium topics, by 31st July 2023.