LINGUIST List 21.3880 Sun Oct 03 2010 Calls: Historical Linguistics/Japan Editor for this issue: Elyssa Winzeler <elyssalinguistlist.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.    David Willis, Drift and Long-Term Morphosyntactic Change Message 1: Drift and Long-Term Morphosyntactic Change Date: 01-Oct-2010 From: David Willis <dwew2cam.ac.uk> Subject: Drift and Long-Term Morphosyntactic Change E-mail this message to a friend Full Title: Drift and Long-Term Morphosyntactic Change Date: 25-Jul-2011 - 30-Jul-2011 Location: Osaka, Japan Contact Person: David Willis Meeting Email: dwew2cam.ac.uk Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics Call Deadline: 12-Oct-2010 Meeting Description: Frequently a language undergoes a set of changes that seem to be related to one another. Sometimes, these changes may occur together quickly, perhaps even in the space of one generation. Sometimes, however, changes that seem to be linked may span long periods of time, hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of years. The question arises as to how these changes maintain their momentum and direction. Put simply, how do today's speakers act as though they 'know' that their language has been moving in a particular direction, say, for the last five hundred years and that they should continue to move the language a little way in the same direction? The phenomenon was identified as 'drift' as long ago as 1921 by Edward Sapir, who famously noted that 'language moves down time in a current of its own making. It has drift.' (Sapir 1949 [1921]: 150). Sapir himself attributed drift to psychological causes, which one might consider to be rooted either in performance or in language acquisition, namely 'the unconscious selection on the part of its speakers of those individual variations that are cumulative in some special direction' (Sapir 1949 [1921]: 155). As cases in point, he cited, from the history of English: (i) the tendency to level the formal distinction between subject and object (loss of case inflections) (ii) the tendency towards fixed (SVO) word order (iii) the drift towards the invariant word forms (analytism) Since then the concept of 'drift' has been used loosely to refer to any apparently directed change, as in the drift from synthetic towards analytic syntax observed repeatedly in many Indo-European languages, and thus often amounts to a description of a phenomenon in search of an explanation. The notion of drift is paradoxical since it seems to fly in the face of elementary facts: native speakers have no inbuilt knowledge of the history of their language, and so cannot possibly know how to change their language in the direction 'determined' by history. Call For Papers Preliminary expressions of interest are invited for the following proposed workshop for the 20th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (Osaka, 2011). Please contact David Willis (dwew2cam.ac.uk) (Cambridge), ideally with a preliminary title, by 12 October 2010. While the term 'drift' has come to be regarded with some suspicion as implying some kind of mysterious force guiding language - indeed McMahon refers to it as 'the rather mystical concept of drift' (McMahon 1994: 138) - the phenomenon nevertheless remains and demands explanation. It may be more neutrally identified as 'long-term change' and 'long-term development', avoiding the geological metaphor of plate tectonics. Explanations for drift have a long history in typological approaches to language change, where the notion that there are regular pathways down which change is channelled goes back at least to the Schleicher's morphological cycle (isolating > agglutinating > synthetic). More recently, typological work has focused on limiting the possible pathways between typologically consistent language states (Hawkins 1979, 1990, Lehmann 1973, Vennemann 1974). There has been a resurgence of interest also among formally oriented linguists, with the idea of 'cascading parametric change', embedded within a theory of markedness (Biberauer & Roberts 2008, Roberts 2007). According to this approach, one syntactic change (a change in a parameter setting) may skew the primary linguistic data for language acquisition, making a subsequent change more likely. Other factors that have been suggested as causes of long-term change include markedness, economy and the need to reestablish a synchronically motivated stable system. Both of these last ideas brings us back to Andersen's earlier structuralist approach to drift, according to which long-term change is real and motivated by 'the drive toward internal conformity between the type of the language and its system, and between the system and the norms', as witnessed in his analysis of long-term development of the Polish past tenses. The pace and structure of long-term developments are influenced by complex hierarchies of markedness, according to which the propensity of a given feature to conform to the broader linguistic system correlates with abstract notions of markedness (Andersen 1990). This workshop aims to enhance our understanding of the processes that may lead to long-term, apparently directional, changes and sequences of changes and to enhance our understanding of the internal make-up of these changes. In particular, we seek to explore the following questions: (a) Is drift different from other processes of language change, such as analogy, grammaticalisation and/or parametric change? If yes, how? (b) Is drift the system's reaction towards asymmetry? If yes, what is the evidence for that? (c) Can there be short-term drift? Or drift should be viewed as the opposite process from 'catastrophic' (i.e., parametric) change? (d) Is the notion of drift only compatible with a deterministic approach to language change? (e) Is drift unidirectional? (f) How can drift be rendered compatible with random variability? Can random chance cause a drift? Papers are invited which address these questions, either the reality of such developments or possible explanations for them, in any language or language family, from any of a number of possible perspectives, whether typological, structuralist or formal. Papers that compare or reconcile different approaches are particularly welcome. References Andersen, Henning. 1990. The structure of drift. In Henning Andersen & Konrad Koerner (eds.), Historical linguistics 1987: Papers from the 8th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (8. ICHL): (Lille, 31 August - 4 September 1987), 1-20. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Biberauer, Theresa & Ian Roberts. 2008. Cascading parameter change: Internally-driven change in Middle and Early Modern English. In Thórhallur Eythórsson (ed.), Grammatical change and linguistic theory: The Rosendal papers, 79-113. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hawkins, John A. 1979. Implicational universals as predictors of word order change. Language 55, 618-48. Hawkins, John A. 1990. A parsing theory of word order universals. Linguistic Inquiry 21, 223-61. Lehmann, Winfred P. 1973. A structural principle of language and its implications. Language 49, 47-66. McMahon, April. 1994. Understanding language change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roberts, Ian. 2007. Diachronic syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sapir, Edward. 1949 [1921]. Language: An introduction to the study of speech. London: Harvest. Vennemann, Theo. 1974. Topics, subjects, and word order: From SXV to SVX via TVX. In John M. Anderson & Charles Jones (eds.), Historical linguistics: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Edinburgh, 2nd-7th Sept. 1973, 339-76. Amsterdam: North Holland. Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue Page Updated: 03-Oct-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.