Failed Expectations and Thwarted Intentions: Avertivity and frustrativity in crosslinguistic perspective

Convenors: Patrick Caudal, David Felipe Guerrero Beltran, Marie Legentil, Simon Overall, Beatrice Pahontu, & Katarzyna Wojtylak

Avertivity / frustrativity is a relatively understudied category that expresses the non-realization of some expected or desired event expressed in the clause (i.e. ‘someone nearly/almost did something’ or ‘someone was going to do something [but didn’t]’). This workshop brings together researchers interested in the grammar and semantics of avertive constructions, by focusing on both cross-linguistic comparison and data from individual languages. We invite abstracts for oral presentations focusing on the following topics:

• Theoretical-empirical delimitation and labeling of avertivity/frustrativity.

• Analysis of avertive/frustrative marking in specific languages.

• Constraints on avertive/frustrative constructions.

• Cross-linguistic analysis of avertivity/frustrativity from diachronic, comparative, and/or areal approaches.

• Relations between avertivity/frustrativity and TAME.

• Avertivity/frustrativity within the semantics-pragmatics interface.

• Language specific and/or cross-linguistic semantic clusters involving avertivity/frustrativity.

Fillers and Placeholders

Convenors: Françoise Rose & Brigitte Pakendorf

Fillers are non-silent linguistic devices employed to gain time while retrieving words, such as “search sounds” like um, specific words like the Spanish demonstrative este, or discourse markers like y’know. Among these devices, placeholders are specific lexical items that fill in the slot of the delayed word or constituent. As such, they are often at least partially morphologically integrated. Although fillers mainly fulfill disfluency and self-repair functions, they can also participate in interaction management and discourse planning, and they can be used intentionally as vague expressions and generic terms like ‘N and such’. While it is likely that fillers are found in all languages, they are rarely described in any depth. The aim of this workshop is therefore to fill in our gap of knowledge of this linguistic phenomenon that lies at the interface between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.

Linguistic Typology and Diversity: Theory, methods, and ethics in sign language typology

Convenors: Erin Wilkinson & Lynn Hou

The field of sign language typology has become increasingly prominent in recent years. The majority of the undocumented sign language diversity in the world is located outside of the Global North. If, for scientific reasons, linguists think it is important to embark on ambitious data gathering projects to expand the breadth and depth of sign language typology, then this will necessarily involve a major effort to collect data from signing communities far from the home institutions of those projects, and of most sign language linguists. We want to open a dialogue about whether typological projects have benefitted or perhaps have harmed wider signing communities, particularly those located outside of the Global North, -- if so, then what ways? Also, we find some theoretical issues with the use of traditional frameworks which organize languages into “language families”: for some sign language varieties these frameworks seem to work reasonably well (e.g. Schembri et al 2010) but for many others they do not. These problems are reflected in the unsatisfactory ways in which sign language families are characterized in major cataloguing projects. In raising these and other concerns about the theoretical, methodological, and ethical considerations inherent in sign language typology work, this workshop hopes to create a space for a broad discussion among the community of linguists interested in sign language typology at ALT 14. Such discussions have been taking place in the field already, but generally these have been in more private networks. We believe that a more public discussion of these issues is both timely and important to the future not only of sign language linguistics but also of linguistic typology.

Situating Constituency Within Typological Research

Convenors: Jeff Good & Adam Tallman

The goal of this workshop is to launch a discussion of constituency from a typological perspective, especially in light of recent advances in quantitative approaches to typology and the study of grammar. Questions to be considered include what features of theoretical approaches to constituency can be usefully adapted for typological investigation, what kinds of coding and data analysis strategies are needed to study constituency typologically, and how the tools of typology can be used to shed light on traditional distinctions, such as the contrast between word and phrase, and determine the extent to which such categories can be considered cross-linguistically valid. An additional consideration will be the extent to which observed typological patterns of constituency can be linked to patterns of language use. Contributions exploring concerns emanating from formal linguistic theories, such as so-called bracketing paradoxes or discontinuous constituents, from a typological perspective, are also welcome. While the focus of the workshop is the typology of constituency, papers focusing on specific languages will also be considered as long as they situate their results with respect to broader typological concerns.

Spoken- and Signed-language Corpus Studies in Linguistic Typology

Convenors: Danielle Barth, Ludger Paschen, François Pellegrino, Matthew Stave, Stefan Schnell & Frank Seifart

The purpose of this workshop is to provide a forum for discussion of ongoing corpus-based typological work that is primarily based on spoken- or signed-language corpora, and that addresses questions of efficiency, information-theoretic considerations in language production, cross-linguistic phonetic-prosodic patterns, the cognitive-articulatory basis of speech production, etc. Also relevant are studies that address specific comparisons of mode differences. A further goal is to bring to the fore the key role of language acquisition studies of spoken and signed languages. This workshop will showcase the enormous relevance of spoken- and signed language production research for linguistic typology and to establish an ongoing exchange between researchers in this area and beyond on matters of development and analysis of spoken and signed corpora. We welcome contributions of the following kind and on related topics:

• Comparative studies into any area of linguistic and discourse structure based on spoken- or signed-language corpora

• Chunking of speech/signing and its relationship with discourse planning and/or the formation of linguistic units

• Studies in conversation analysis in spoken and/or signed languages

• Corpus-based studies of language acquisition of under-studied spoken or signed languages, or comparisons thereof

• Comparative studies that explicitly address mode differences and their effects on language production and evolution

• Comparative corpus-phonetic studies addressing typological variation or putative universals

• Reports on (multilingual) corpus building projects (should include showcase/proof-of-concept study)

• We welcome studies using any spoken or signed corpora, including, but not limited to, corpora from Multi-CAST (https://multicast.aspra.uni-bamberg.de), DoReCo (http://doreco.info/), or SCOPIC (https://scopicproject.wordpress.com). Note that these three will be significantly enhanced by addition of new languages in the course of 2022. Please contact the organizers for updates.