Workshops

Workshop proposals accepted by the Program Committee of ALTXV

Valency and valency alternations within and across language boundaries

Convenors:


Cross-linguistically, semantically similar verbs show similar patterns of valency, understood as morphosyntactic treatment of their arguments. We include here argument realization across verb classes, voice phenomena, lability and more generally valency alternations. So far, research has been focused on the range of cross-linguistic variation across languages of different genealogical and areal affiliation, and on attempts to extract general coding tendencies. This workshop aims to promote an integrated research program on valency and valency alternations that encompasses not only cross-linguistic but also intra-linguistic variation and dynamics of language internal and contact-induced change, by addressing open research questions such as valency patterns in corpora, in diachrony and in contact situations, areal variation and impact of sociolinguistic factors.


Workshop on Dependency Grammar for Typology

Convenors:

Large-scale multilingual corpora such as Universal Dependencies have enabled advances in quantitative methods in morphosyntactic typology, allowing a transition from binary or multivariate classifications of linguistic features to more nuanced, continuous classifications. These enable us to capture variation better than ever before (Levshina et al. 2023) while studying linguistic variation from a token-based perspective (Haspelmath 2018). This workshop aims to bring together typologists working using dependency-annotated corpora for quantitative typological research and linguists unfamiliar with this research. We aim to include both new studies that peruse dependency-annotated corpora to answer typological questions, as well as more critical research which points to the limitations of ‘dependency grammar for typology’. This also includes proposals on how quantitative typology can be conducted using heterogeneous data sources and the development of dependency grammar resources for understudied languages.

Replication & reproducibility in quantitative typology

Conveners:

Reproducibility, especially comparing methods rather than new samples, has played a relatively minor role in quantitative typology so far. While some of the more high-profile studies (e.g. Atkinson 2011, Chen 2013, Everett 2017, Maddieson 2018) have received further attention, including methodological discussions (Hartmann 2022, Cysouw, Michael, Dan Dediu & Steven Moran 2012, Roberts, Winters & Chen 2015), many typological studies are never replicated. Additionally, our field still lacks common standards for replication and testing reproducibility, and most replication studies use different data as well as methods compared to the original studies. Similarly, there is no consensus and little discussion on how we should generally think about studies which fail to (partially) replicate with other datasets, methods, or both. In this workshop, we want to promote the discussion on new developments and challenges related to replication and reproducibility of typological studies.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

replication case studies, e.g. – using identical methods as the original study, but a different dataset – using an identical dataset as the original study, but different methods – replicating low-profile or low-stakes typological studies

current challenges for replication and reproducibility in typology, e.g. – discussions on how to deal with studies which fail to replicate – discussions relating to the robustness of result and uncertainty in typological studies – discussions on data and annotation transparency in typological studies – discussions on how robust data classification and annotations are (e.g. testing for inter-rater agreement)


Proper names and their morphosyntactic behavior – special or not?

Conveners:

  • The late Johannes Helmbrecht (University of Regensburg, Germany)
  • Thomas Stolz, University of Bremen, Germany, [email protected]
  • Julia Nintemann (University of Bremen, Germany), [email protected]

Proper names like, for instance, person names, place names, and others, are functionally defined by their referential properties (unique singular referents in the world) and are usually considered as a sub-class of nouns, since they constitute a noun/ referential phrase on their own. Marking differences and distributional differences between proper names and common nouns have been described for European languages, but cross-linguistic studies on the morphosyntactic differences between person names, place names, and other name types has just begun. The proposed workshop invites contributions that investigate these differences for individual languages, or cross-linguistically, in the grammatical domains of case marking of arguments, adjuncts, verbal agreement/ indexing, word order, grammatical relations, alignment types, and the morphology of case paradigms and agreement markers. In addition, we invite contribution that discuss the morphosyntactic differences between proper names and common nouns with regard to the Animacy Hierarchy (in particular the position of proper names in this hierarchy and the similarity to kinship terms), with regard to the claimed/ presupposed nounhood of proper names (approaches to part of speech classifications), and with regard to approaches to typological markedness such as the correlation of token frequency in discourse and asymmetrical marking.

Understudied aspects of phasal polarity (half-day)

Conveners:

Phasal polarity is an onomasiological domain of concepts ALREADY, STILL, NOT YET and NO LONGER. The purpose of the workshop is to enhance research on this domain focusing on aspects that has not yet been studied in detail such as the typology of NO LONGER, cross-linguistically rare relationships between PhP expressions (for example, co-lexification of STILL and NO LONGER, STILL and ALREADY), theoretical status of expressions sharing PhP and non-PhP meanings. In terms of areal coverage, the existing literature on PhP is strongly biased towards the languages of Europe, Africa and Papunesia, while, for example, PhP systems in the languages of the Americas seem to be described rather poorly, especially from a typological perspective. In addition, cross-linguistic studies of the entire PhP domain require a more balanced and representative expansion of the currently available database. Related to this, we particularly welcome abstracts that consider PhP expressions in lesser-studied languages and from the indigenous languages of the American continents.

Exploring the feasibility of integrating Radical Construction Grammar and The Creation of Meaning for language description and typological comparison

Conveners:

Join our workshop as we delve into the integration of Radical Construction Grammar (RCG) and The Creation of Meaning (COM) for a nuanced approach to language analysis. This collaboration arises from critiques by William Croft and Randy J. LaPolla challenging traditional structuralist methods. Croft (2001, 2022) advocates a non-reductionist perspective, highlighting the variability of word classes and syntactic structures. LaPolla (2003, 2015, 2022) supports a integrative non-structuralist and cognitive approach, emphasizing the diversity of world views and their manifestations in languages. The core mechanism of communication is not seen as coding-decoding, but as inferring the communicator's intention in doing a communicative act, which does not have to include languaging. This integration aims to overcome existing limitations in language analysis and comparison, providing a comprehensive framework. Merging RCG's constructional focus with COM's emphasis on communicative acts as constraining the inference of the communicator's intention, the workshop explores the potential for a robust foundation in typological studies.