Call for abstracts

Argument coding patterns consist of bound markers indicating the semantic and syntactic dependency of the arguments from their verb and are either argument-bound (flagging or dependent-marking) or verb-bound (indexing or head-marking), see Haspelmath (2019). Much scholarly attention has been devoted to the variation in the productivity degrees of the transitive pattern across languages. The semantic core of the verbs that typically assign the transitive coding to their arguments is generally stable across languages (Tsunoda 1985; Haspelmath 2015). This is also true of one-place intransitive verbs. The features that are responsible for both classes are well understood (Hopper & Thompson 1980; Tsunoda 1985; Næss 2007). Transitive and intransitive verbs are also relatively stable cross-linguistically in terms of their alignment options (ergative, accusative or a mixture of the two). It is nevertheless known that languages significantly differ in their ‘transitivity prominence’, that is, in the lexical extent of the transitive class (Haspelmath 2015).

By contrast, non-transitive bivalent patterns show much more versatility in coding frames they represent across and within languages. Although language-specific non-transitive bivalent patterns display relatively low type and token frequencies compared to the transitive pattern, collectively, they can be even more frequent than transitive verbs both in the lexicon (type frequency) and in the corpus (token frequency). However, they are often analyzed merely in terms of “deviations” from the transitive prototype (Kittilä 2011) and, generally speaking, remain quite understudied by typologists and linguists exploring areal phenomena. For example, so far no universal trends have been detected with respect to these patterns.

High degrees of both intralinguistic and cross-linguistic versatility of non-transitive bivalent patterns make it difficult to find strong universal trends in this domain. By the same token, this variability accounts for strong local and areal skewings in the cross-linguistic distributions and thus presents an excellent testing ground for various approaches within the variationist paradigm. In particular, non-transitive bivalent patterns lend themselves to exploring various areal pressures and specific contact situations (see the collection of papers in Grossman et al., eds., 2019). However, the difficulty here is to establish a cross-linguistically applicable set of comparative concepts for the non-transitive codings. Various solutions to this problem have been suggested (Say 2014; Bickel et al. 2016; Hartmann et al. 2016; Seržant et al., forthc.), but none of them seems to have gained general acceptance to date. Available studies focusing on areality in valency patterns are mainly limited to unearthing contact-induced phenomena in individual languages (Grosmann 2019) or areal effects in medium-size areas (inter alia, Seržant 2015a, 2015b; Gaszewski 2020; Widmer et al. 2019), while attempts to trace large-scale effects are generally lacking.

We invite contributions that explore variation, language contact and/or areal effects, diachronic changes or typological distribution of argument-coding patterns. The workshop topics include but are not limited to:

• methodology of cross-linguistic studies on valency patterns, including ways to identify a tertium comparationis;

• calques and other types of PAT-borrowings and their effect on the development of valency patterns in individual languages;

• areal effects in the distribution of valency patterns associated with specific verb types, such as, e.g., perception verbs, interaction verbs, pursuit verbs, etc.;

• areal distribution of valency patterns in synchrony and/or diachrony;

• interaction of genealogical and areal effects in the development of valency patterns;

• cross-linguistic corpus-based analysis of valency patterns, their frequency and productivity;

• diachronic changes and diachronic (in)stability of the bivalent patterns;

• effects of language contact on argument coding in specific languages.

References

Bickel, Balthasar, Taras Zakharko, Lennart Bierkandt, & Alena Witzlack-Makarevich. 2016. Semantic role clustering: An empirical assessment of semantic role types in non-default case assignment. In Seppo Kittila & Fernando Zúñiga (eds.). Advances in research on semantic roles, 51–78.

Gaszewski, Jerzy. 2020. Does Verb Valency Pattern Areally in Central Europe? A First Look. In Szucsich, Luka, Agnes Kim, & Uliana Yazhinova (eds.). Areal convergence in Eastern Central European languages and beyond. Berlin et al. Peter Lang, 13–53.

Grossman, Eitan. 2019. Language-Specific Transitivities in Contact: The Case of Coptic. Journal of language contact 12 (1). 89-115.

Grossman, Eitan, Alena Witzlack-Makarevich & Ilja Seržant, eds., 2019. Valency and transitivity in contact: theoretical and empirical issues. Journal of Language Contact 12(1). Special issue.

Hartmann, Iren, Martin Haspelmath & Michael Cysouw. 2016. Identifying semantic role clusters and alignment types via microrole coexpression tendencies. In Seppo Kittila & Fernando Zúñiga (eds.). Advances in research on semantic roles, 27–49.

Haspelmath, Martin. 2015. Transitivity prominence. In Andrej L. Malchukov & Bernard Comrie (eds.), Valency classes in the world’s languages, vol. 1: Introducing the framework, and case studies from Africa and Eurasia (Comparative Handbooks of Linguistics 1/1), 131-147. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.

Haspelmath, Martin. 2019. Indexing and flagging, and head and dependent marking. Te Reo, the Journal of the Linguistic Society of New Zealand 62(1), 93-115.

Haspelmath, Martin & Iren Hartmann. 2015. Comparing verbal valency across languages. In Andrej L. Malchukov & Bernard Comrie (eds.), Valency classes in the world’s languages: A comparative handbook, vol. 1, 41–71. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

Hopper, Paul J. & Sandra A. Thompson. 1980. Transitivity in Grammar and Discourse. Language 56(2), 251-299.

Kittilä, Seppo. 2011. Transitivity typology. In Jae Jung Song (ed.), The Oxford handbook of linguistic typology, 346–367. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Næss, Åshild. 2007. Prototypical Transitivity (Typological studies in language 72). Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Say, Sergey. 2014. Bivalent Verb Classes in the Languages of Europe. A Quantitative Typological Study, Language Dynamics and Change 4(1), 116–166.

Seržant, Ilja A. 2015a: Dative experiencer constructions as a Circum-Baltic isogloss. In: P. Arkadiev, A. Holvoet, B. Wiemer (eds.), Contemporary Approaches to Baltic Linguistics. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter. 325-348.

Seržant, Ilja A. 2015b: Independent partitive as a Circum-Baltic isogloss, Journal Language Contact 8, 341-418.

Seržant, Ilja A., Björn Wiemer, Eleni Bužarovska, Martina Ivanová, Maxim Makartsev, Stefan Savić, Dmitri Sitchinava, Karolína Skwarska, Mladen Uhlik, Areal and diachronic trends in argument flagging across Slavic. In: Eystein Dahl (ed.), Alignment and Alignment Change in the Indo-European Family. Oxford: OUP. (accepted)

Tsunoda, Tasaku. 1985. Remarks on transitivity. Journal of Linguistics 21. 385–396.

Widmer, Paul, Stefan Dedio, Lea Gafner, & Barbara Sonnenhauser. 2019. Comparing the multi-faceted morphosyntax of microrole selection. Paper presented at the 13th ALT conference, Pavia. 06.09.2019.