LINGUIST List 21.4229 Sun Oct 24 2010 Calls: Historical Linguistics, Syntax/Spain Editor for this issue: Di Wdzenczny <dilinguistlist.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.     Alena Witzlack-Makarevich , Referential Hierarchies in Alignment Typology Message 1: Referential Hierarchies in Alignment Typology Date: 22-Oct-2010 From: Alena Witzlack-Makarevich <witzlackuni-leipzig.de> Subject: Referential Hierarchies in Alignment Typology E-mail this message to a friend Full Title: Referential Hierarchies in Alignment Typology Date: 08-Sep-2011 - 11-Sep-2011 Location: Logroño (La Rioja), Spain Contact Person: Alena Witzlack-Makarevich Meeting Email: witzlackuni-leipzig.de Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Syntax; Typology Call Deadline: 11-Nov-2010 Meeting Description: Within the framework of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea to be held at the Universidad de La Rioja (Logroño, Spain), 8-11 September 2011, we would like to propose a workshop on Referential Hierarchies in Alignment Typology Convenors Balthasar Bickel (University of Leipzig) Anna Siewierska (Lancaster University) Alena Witzlack-Makarevich (University of Leipzig) Since the first comprehensive descriptions of languages with ergative alignment patterns in the 70s (Dixon 1972, Comrie 1978), alignment figures as a prominent typological feature both in cross-linguistic investigations and in the descriptions of individual languages. The term 'alignment' refers to the way argument roles S, A, and P - and T and G, if one extends the analysis to ditransitives - are organized relative to each other in the morphosyntax, that is, which arguments are marked identically or exhibit identical syntactic behavior. The taxonomy of all logical possibilities of grouping the three argument roles yields five alignment types: neutral, accusative, ergative, tripartite, and horizontal. These basic alignment types are still common in characterizing whole languages or language systems (e.g. case marking or agreement, syntactic behavior) and serve as a basis for multiple typological investigations (Greenberg 1963; Nichols 1992; Siewierska 1996; Dryer 2002; Bickel and Nichols 2008). However, as not all systems of morphological marking or syntactic behavior fit neatly into one of the basic alignment patterns, this resulted in the modification of the basic taxonomy and introduction of additional types. Particularly challenging for alignment typology are the patterns of argument identification found in languages in which the morphosyntactic properties of arguments are affected by referential hierarchies (e.g. in which speech-act participants rank higher than third persons, animate entities higher than inanimate ones, and known entities higher than unknown ones). Basically, three different types of effects of referential hierarchies can be distinguished. First, the hierarchical ranking of nominal referents can directly affect the marking of a particular argument resulting in what is known as differential object and differential subject marking. This phenomenon is frequently treated as a split in the alignment of a language system, such that arguments on different positions of a referential hierarchy exhibit different alignment types (e.g. 1st and 2nd person is neutral, whereas 3rd person is ergative). Another type of effects is represented by so-called 'direct/inverse' systems, as founde.g. in Algonquian languages. Here, morphological markers on transitive verbs indicate whether the agent is higher or lower in the referential hierarchy than the patient, i.e., whether the action goes in the expected direction ('direct') or against it ('inverse'). Usually, such patterns are not discussed in terms of alignment. Finally, the referential hierarchy may determine the choice and/or order of person indices on the verb, a system often characterized as 'hierarchical agreement' (e.g. in Tupi- Guaranian languages): when there is only one affixal person-marking slot on the verb, it is the higher-ranking person that is indexed, regardless of its role. A similar kind of effect is observed in many Austronesian languages, such as Tagalog, where the constituent highest on an information-structural hierarchy (an argument or an adjunct) is marked in a special way and gains certain syntactic privileges. At the same time, the voice marking on the verbs indicates the semantic roles of this privileged constituent (cf. Schachter & Otanes 1972; Schachter 1976). One way to accommodate such systems into the alignment typology is to introduce additional alignment types called hierarchical alignment (Nichols 1992; Siewierska 1998, 2005) and Philippine-type alignment (Mallison & Blake 1981). Such additional types are, however, problematic because they are based on other principles than the basic alignment types, namely, not on semantic roles (agent/patient), but on referential properties of event participants (Zúñiga 2007, Creissels 2009). Moreover, the introduction of the special alignment types conceals the fact that hierarchical systems contain traces of the basic alignment types (cf. Nichols 1992; Bickel 1995; Bickel and Nichols 2008).The proposed workshop is intended to bring together scholars interested in the effects of referential hierarchies on the morphosyntactic properties of arguments and in the position of such systems in the typology of alignment or grammatical relations more generally. The main topics of the workshop will include, but are not limited to, the following: -The theoretical status of systems exhibiting referential hierarchy effects in alignment typology. -The diachronic development of referential hierarchy effects in individual languages, language families or linguistic areas from any part of the world. -Case studies of hierarchical systems in less documented languages. Authors working on individual languages are encouraged to situate their findings in a broader theoretical/typological perspective. References Bickel, Balthasar. 1995. In the vestibule of meaning: transitivity inversion as a morphological phenomenon. Studies in Language 19:73-127. Bickel, Balthasar, and Johanna Nichols. 2008b. The geography of case. In The Oxford Handbook of Case, ed. Andrej Malchukov and Andrew Spencer, 479-493.Oxford: Oxford University Press. Comrie, Bernard. Ergativity. In W.P. Lehmann (ed.), Syntactic Typology. Studies in the Phenomenology of Language. Austin: University of Texas Press, 329-394. Creissels, Denis. 2009a. Ergativity/Accusativity Revisited. Presented at ALT VIII, Berkeley (www.deniscreissels.fr/public/Creissels-ergativity.pdf), 24-28 August 2009. Dixon, R.M.W. (1972). The Dyirbal Language of North Queendland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dryer, Matthew S. 2002. Case distinctions, rich verb agreement, and word order type (comments on Hawkins' paper). Theoretical Linguistics 28:151- 157. Greenberg, Joseph H. 1963. Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements. In Universals of Language, ed. Joseph Greenberg, 73-113. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mallinson, Graham, and Barry Blake. 1981. Language typology. Cross- linguistic Studies in Syntax. Amsterdam: North-Holland. Nichols, Johanna. 1992. Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schachter, Paul. 1976. The subject in Philippine languages: topic, actor, actor-topic, or none of the above. In Subject and Topic, ed. Charles N. Li, 492-518. New York: Academic Press. Schachter, Paul, and Fe T. Otanes. 1972. Tagalog reference grammar. Berkeley: University of California Press. Siewierska, Anna. 1996. Word order type and alignment. Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 49:149-176. Siewierska, Anna. 1998. On nominal and verbal person marking. Linguistic Typology 2:1-56. Siewierska, Anna. 2005. Alignment of verbal person marking. In The World Atlas of Language Structures, ed. Martin Haspelmath, Matthew S. Dryer, David Gil, and Bernard Comrie, 406-409. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zúñiga, Fernando. 2007. From the typology of inversion to the typology of alignment. In New Challenges in Typology, ed. Matti Miestamo and Bernhard Wälchli, 199-220. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Procedure: Abstracts are invited for 20-minute presentations plus 10 minutes for discussion. Interested colleagues are invited to send an e-mail to Alena Witzlack-Makarevich (witzlackuni-leipzig.de) with their name, affiliation and a provisional abstract (max. 500 words) before 11 November 2010. Important dates: - Submission of provisional abstract (max. 500 words): 11 November 2010 - Notification of acceptance for workshop proposals will be given by 15 December 2010. - If the workshop proposal is accepted, all abstracts will have to be submitted to the SLE by January 15, 2011 via the conference site (http://sle2011.cilap.es/). - Notification of acceptance: 31 March 2011 - Registration: from April 1 onwards - Conference: 8-11 September 2011 Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue Page Updated: 24-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.