LINGUIST List 21.3638 Wed Sep 15 2010 Confs: Historical Ling, Syntax/Japan Editor for this issue: Amy Brunett <brunettlinguistlist.org> LINGUIST is pleased to announce the launch of an exciting new feature: Easy Abstracts! Easy Abs is a free abstract submission and review facility designed to help conference organizers and reviewers accept and process abstracts online. Just go to: http://www.linguistlist.org/confcustom, and begin your conference customization process today! With Easy Abstracts, submission and review will be as easy as 1-2-3! Directory         1.    Jóhanna Barðdal, Reconstructing Syntax Message 1: Reconstructing Syntax Date: 14-Sep-2010 From: Jóhanna Barðdal <johanna.barddaluib.no> Subject: Reconstructing Syntax E-mail this message to a friend Reconstructing Syntax Date: 25-Jul-2011 - 30-Jul-2011 Location: Osaka, Japan Contact: Jóhanna Barðdal Contact Email: johanna.barddaluib.no Meeting URL: http://org.uib.no/iecastp/IECASTP/Workshop8.htm Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Syntax Meeting Description: Historical-comparative reconstruction has traditionally been focused on lexical, morphological and phonological comparisons, while syntactic reconstruction has either been systematically left unattended, regarded as fruitless or uninteresting, or even rebuked (cf. Watkins 1964, Jeffers 1976, Lightfoot 1979, 2006, Harrison 2003, Pires & Thomason 2008, Mengden 2008, inter alia). The reason for this is that syntactic structures have been regarded as fundamentally different from, for instance, morphological structures, in several respects. That is, syntactic structures are larger and more complex units than morphological units. Semantically they have not been regarded on par with morphological units either, in that their meaning is regarded as the sum of the meaning of the lexical parts that instantiate them, and because of this semantic compositionality they have not been regarded as being arbitrary form-meaning correspondences like words. It has also been argued in the literature that syntactic structures are not inherited in the same way as the vocabulary (Lightfoot 1979 and later work), that there is no cognate material to compare when comparing sentences across daughter languages (Jeffers 1976), that there is no regularity of syntactic change, as opposed to the regularity of phonological change (Lightfoot 2002, Pirus & Thomason 2008), and that there is no arbitrariness found in syntax (Harrison 2003), all of which render syntactic reconstruction fundamentally different from phonological reconstruction. Recent work within historical-comparative syntax takes issue with this view of syntactic reconstruction (Kikusawa 2003, Harris 2008, Bauern 2008, Barðdal & Eythórsson 2009, Barðdal 2010), arguing that the concepts of 'cognate status,' 'arbitrariness' and 'regularity' are non-problematic for syntactic reconstruction. This is so, first, because cognates are also found in syntax (Kikusawa 2003, Barðdal & Eythórsson 2009, Barðdal 2010). Second, because the arbitrariness requirement is simply not needed in syntax, as its role is first and foremost to aid in deciding on genetic relatedness, which is usually not an issue when doing syntactic reconstruction (Harrison 2003, Barðdal & Eythórsson 2009, Barðdal 2010). And, third, because a) the sound laws are only regular by definition (Hoenigswald 1987), and b) the sound laws are basically stand-ins for a similarity metric when deciding upon cognate status (Harrison 2003). Please see http://org.uib.no/iecastp/IECASTP/Workshop8.htm for complete list of references. Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue Page Updated: 15-Sep-2010       About LINGUIST    |   Contact Us       While the LINGUIST List makes every effort to ensure the linguistic relevance of sites listed on its pages, it cannot vouch for their contents.