CFP

LAGB 2022: LAGB 2022: Linguistics Association of Great Britain and Northern Ireland 2022

Belfast, UK, September 12-15, 2022

Conference website	http://www.lagb.org.uk/
Submission link	https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=lagb2022
Submission deadline	May 13, 2022

LAGB 2022

(Ulster University, Belfast, United Kingdom, 12-15 September 2022)

Henry Sweet Lecture 2022

Maria Teresa Guasti

Linguistics Association Lecture 2022

Liina Pylkkanen

Summer School

Details to be confirmed

Special sessions

Language analysis in UK schools: some case studies.
Descriptive and documentary work on languages with less-accessible description and documentation.
Linguistic distance in language reconstruction and language acquisition.
Advances and challenges in teaching linguistics at university.
Minoritized languages’ impact on linguistic theory.
Contrastive focalization: Challenges and solutions.
Agents: Grammar or roots?

Call for papers

The LAGB welcomes abstract submissions from all subfields of linguistics to capture the diversity of linguistics research in the UK and beyond. LAGB 2022 will not only feature our usual general sessions that will run throughout the conference, but will also include seven themed sessions. Abstracts can be submitted to be included in the general sessions, or as part of a themed session (see details below). Both members and non-members are invited to offer papers for the meeting. All abstracts will be blind-peer-reviewed by an international committee of reviewers. The length for all papers delivered at the LAGB 2022 meeting is 20 minutes (plus 10 minutes discussion). The deadline for submissions is 5PM GMT Friday 29 April 2022 [extended till 5PM GMT Friday 13 May 2022].

Formatting guidelines

To ensure that we are able to consider your abstract, please ensure that it adheres to the following guidelines:

Maximum of two single spaced A4 pages with margins of at least 2.5cm on all sides, with type no smaller than 12 point font in Times New Roman.
Submitted anonymously, with no indication of the author’s identity.
Immediately below the title of your abstract, please indicate whether you wish for your abstract to be considered for the general session or one of the themed sessions (and, if a themed session, which one).
In PDF format, with any phonetic characters either embedded in the PDF file, or in the Doulos SIL font, which can be downloaded for free from this site: http://scripts.sil.org/DoulosSIL_download.

Themed sessions

LAGB 2022 will feature 7 themed sessions, details of which are provided below. When you submit your abstract, please indicate underneath your title whether you are submitting it for consideration for the general session, or for one of these themed sessions.

Language analysis in UK schools: some case studies

This session aims to showcase some of the current initiatives happening around the UK that attempt to increase students’ ability to undertake language analysis. We intend to focus particularly on cross-curricular activities, as well as on activities that go beyond the various national school curricula in the UK, but presentations relating to any aspect of language analysis in schools would be welcome. Each presentation will be aimed at two audiences: (a) teachers who are looking for resources and ideas to enhance their students’ analytical skills and (b) academic linguists who are looking for opportunities to engage with outreach and knowledge exchange work in schools.

The focus on cross-curricular activities reflects some of the aims and objectives of LASER (https://clie.org.uk/laser/), an initiative supported by both LAGB and BAAL. While language analysis has always had some role to play in the English and foreign language classrooms, there is also evidence that these analytic skills have a role to play in STEM subjects (Glaister 2019, Sheldon 2019). This is of relevance not just to current teachers, but also to future teachers, so we hope that the issues that are raised regarding language analysis in schools might bear on curricular developments in undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in linguistics.

We intend the session to be the starting point for two particular developments. First, we hope to set up some regional hubs to promote language analysis in schools. The idea is that academics in a given region would work with local teachers to co-produce and test materials and to organise CPD training and other events for a range of secondary school subjects. Second, we hope to develop a central, national repository - along the lines of NCELP (https://resources.ncelp.org/) but on more restricted scale - in which to store and share all successful materials, once tested, and via which to link to other useful materials for language analysis in relation to English, modern foreign languages and other secondary school subjects.

Some examples of the kinds of activities we envisage as part of the session are:

problem-solving skills and enquiry-based learning in linguistics and STEM subjects
sociolinguistics projects complementing the school foreign language syllabus
corpus linguistics projects for A-level English Language
artificial language creation

As is often the case with the Education Committee session, we intend to have both teachers and academics as presenters.

Contact Eva Duran Eppler (e.eppler@roehampton.ac.uk) with any questions.

Descriptive and documentary work on languages with less-accessible description and documentation

Recent efforts to decolonise the discipline of linguistics and promote work on less-described languages have highlighted the importance of making data as widely accessible as possible (Gawne et al. 2017; Berez-Kroeker et al. 2018; Druskat & von Prince 2019), in line with Open Science practices and the FAIR principles (Crüwell et al. 2019; Wilkinson et al. 2016). This applies both to the source community (the community which the data comes from) and the international community (the wider community of international researchers and the public). Yet, there are cases in which primary documentation and a linguistic description of a language or variety can only be reached by a limited number of researchers and people, for different reasons, e.g. the work is not available online, there is no translation, access to it is restricted, etc.

While documentary linguistics is concerned with the collection and management of raw and primary linguistic data, such as recordings, observations, transcripts and field notes (Him- melmann 2006; Evans 2008), descriptive linguistics builds upon language documentation to establish structural and functional linguistic patterns and to produce work that discusses them (Chelliah & Willem 2010; Himmelmann 2012; Bowern 2015). The past few decades have seen a surge in the number of documentary corpora targeting languages and varieties from a wide range of language families. In parallel, the same increase can be seen in linguistic descriptions of less-studied languages. However, almost two thirds of the known languages of the world have little descriptive work and one fourth is covered only by word lists or has no description at all (Hammarström et al. 2016). In sum, we are in much need of work which aims to fill this gap by capitalising on existing documentary materials and producing descriptive accounts, a task which deserves in and of itself to be given much more value than it currently is (Dryer 2008; Haspelmath 2021, 2010).

In light of the difficulty of accessing certain products of language documentation and description and the important role descriptive work plays in the advancement of our understanding of Human Language, we invite submissions that engage with these topics and in particular work of the following nature:

Descriptive work on languages or varieties with less-accessible description and docu- mentation resources, as defined above, targeting any branch of linguistics and including small-scale studies or case studies.
Descriptive work on pre-existing resources aimed at complementing the descriptive and documentary knowledge of the selected language/variety.
Documentary work aimed at increasing access of existing linguistic resources (such as digitisation or generation of metadata/annotation).
Documentary work on less-accessible languages/varieties, as defined above, in particular work aimed at creating new documentary corpora released according to Open and FAIR principles.
Conceptual and/or methodological meta-scientific or philosophical work on the issues mentioned above, including ethical, ethnic and sociological considerations.

We will prioritise submissions on languages and language varieties that are spoken by minorities or marginalised or minoritised communities, are endangered or dormant, have little or no sufficiently described documentation.

Contact Stefano Coretta (s.coretta@ed.ac.uk) with any questions.

Linguistic distance in language reconstruction and language acquisition

The aim of this themed session is to consider the role of linguistic distance in the domains of language reconstruction in historical linguistics and learnability in L2 acquisition. In each of these two areas, linguistic distance is used as a method to identify different stages of grammars. Language reconstruction aims to identify different historical stages of grammars in order to provide insight into proto-languages. L2 acquisition research aims to identify developmental stages of L2 grammars, and explain the impact of mother-tongue/L1 on variation in development and outcomes (Schepens et.al.2020). Parameter-based reconstruction and L2 acquisition research share the method of applying linguistic distance measures to identify stages in history or development and the key consideration of how to account for the transition between stages, that is, how to account for language change and language development in acquisition.

The aim of this themed session is to explore the following questions.

Measures of linguistic distance: the Parametric Comparison Method proposed in Longobardi and Guardiano (2017) and Ceolin et.al. 2020 provides specific measures of syntactic distance that allow us to formulate testable predictions to evaluate hypotheses. At the same time, assuming a hierarchy of macro, meso, micro and nano parameters as proposed in Biberauer and Roberts (2015,2017) and Roberts (2019), allows us to consider macro-variation, the effect of broad typological features, separately from micro-variation. How can we combine the parametric method of measuring syntactic distance with a hierarchy of parameters? Should macro-parameters be associated with higher weights in distance measurements? Should we consider measures of macro-distance separately from measures of micro-distance? How do measures of syntactic distance compare with measures of phonological, morphological and lexical distance?
L2 parameter resetting and change: How does linguistic distance affect L2 development and diachronic change? Is there evidence of a hierarchical path in L2 acquisition and/or change with micro-parameters easier to acquire/change and macro-parameters harder to acquire/change? For example, is L2 parameter resetting of macro-parameters possible or is parameter resetting restricted to meso and micro-parameters? Does L1-L2 distance constrain the rate of L2 acquisition or the path of acquisition, e.g. restricting macro-parameter resetting? What is the timeline of change for a macro-parameter vs. a micro-parameter, e.g. can a macro-parameter change within a generation?
Feature learnability and diachronic stability: Is there a connection between the learnability of a feature and its diachronic stability? Does the expression of a parameter---positional, realisational or inflectional---affect its learnability and, consequently its diachronic stability? If some categories are more susceptible to change (Crisma and Pintzuk), can this be linked to L1 and L2 learnability?
Change through contact or endogenous change: If languages can change endogenously or through contact, is there scope to connect the two types of change through differences in L1 and L2 acquisition processes and related feature learnability?

We invite submissions addressing any of the questions in 1-4 and related issues.

Contact Dora Alexopoulou (ta259@cam.ac.uk) with any questions.

Advances and challenges in teaching linguistics at university

This themed session aims to provide a platform in which linguists can present new approaches to teaching linguistics in higher education, including discussion of challenges new and old. Some of these challenges include teaching to students with diverse and changing backgrounds, rapid and continual changes required by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, bureaucracy inhibiting such changes, and the limited capacity of staff to implement changes within existing workload capacity.

Background. Our contemporary “banking model” of education (Freire 1968, hooks 1994, Gannon 2020) places the teacher at the centre of the classroom as the source and assessor of student knowledge. Exams and grading are the standard methods of assessing this knowledge, despite the deep problems with marks as a pedagogical tool (Kohn 1993/2018, 2011, Davidson 2012, Stommel 2017). In response to the inherent deficiencies of this model, alternative methods of teaching and assessment such as the flipped classroom, ungrading (Gibson 2016, Blum 2020), contract grading, skills grading (Brackett and Reuning 1999, Nilson 2014, Schimmer 2016) and unessays (Cordell 2015, Awan 2019) have gained traction in recent years. These methods reflect learning better than exams and grading, while placing an emphasis on balancing skills and content (Ambrose et al 2010) and also providing a more equitable experience for students of different backgrounds (Awan 2019; Gannon 2020). Some of these approaches are already being adopted in linguistics classrooms: Zuraw et al (2019) describe skills-based contract grading in phonetics and phonology, O’Leary and Stockwell (2021) describe skills-based contract grading in formal semantics, and Conrod (2021) discusses participation grading. These approaches to assessment reflect a shift away from teacher-centred models of education toward more student-centred and student-led approaches, requiring new methods and styles of teaching practice.

Challenges. The Covid pandemic has catalysed change in many classrooms by requiring that instructors provide lecture materials and assessments that are asynchronous, available remotely, interactive and engaging. As a result, many of us have had to compress lecture materials into durations suitable for short videos, flip classes to become more student-centred, and replace sit-in exams with more practical or project-based assessments. In the UK, these alterations to course materials and teaching methods were undertaken within a baroque system of ratification and moderation that slow the process of change. In many cases, student numbers have also increased for the 2021-2022 academic year, further straining the already heavy workloads of staff.

We invite submissions that engage with these topics, such as those seeking answers to the following questions:

What novel teaching methods are linguists implementing and developing in higher education?
What useful skills and techniques have we learned as a result of the changes necessary for teaching during the Covid era?
What structural and bureaucratic barriers exist in our institutions, and how can we overcome these?
How do our pedagogical methods interact with EDI and decolonial considerations?
How do we decide what content and what skills to teach, vis-à-vis existing content?

We welcome “case reports” on completed courses or curriculum changes, as well as “works in progress” describing a change currently being implemented.

Contact Itamar Kastner (itamar@itamarkast.net) with any questions.

Minoritized languages’ impact on linguistic theory

It is by now clear that there is a category of minoritized languages (Kasbarian 1997, Py and Jeanneret 1989, Léglise and Alby 2006, Nevins 2022; see also Tamburelli & Tosco 2021) – those that, as a result of purely social constructs, have less power compared to other dominant languages in society (e.g. languages of schooling, as backed by regulating and prescriptive norms), and less overall representation in the scientific and cultural landscape. These languages may not be endangered in the classic sense of the word, but still include languages of contested status, lesser centrality to the effort to build a single language as part of a nation state, or signed languages. This panel discussion aims to demonstrate the scientific impact that these languages in fact can have on linguistic theory once they are welcomed into the canon and viewed as equally transformative in terms of the dialogue between empirical discoveries and continued theoretical modelling. Therefore, we encourage submissions relating to these minoritized languages, as well as those which consider the role of researchers in linguistic activism for these communities. Some example areas for discussion are outlined below:

Emerging sign languages: these provide something of a natural laboratory to observe the development of various levels of linguistic structure. Such languages, which often emerge in absence of an existing language model, are key in identifying the minimal units a linguistic system needs to function, and the various paths of emergence that such structures follow (cf. Sandler et al., 2017). We see consistent strategies to disambiguate argument structure (Sandler et al., 2005; Ergin et al., 2018), while other aspects of linguistic organisation such as consistent phonology (Sandler et al., 2011) and overt syntactic marking (Sandler et al., 2017) seem to follow later. As well as the unique vantage point they provide into diachrony and conventionalisation, young sign languages also enrich our understanding of language typology.

Number Suppletion: It is well-known that there is significant cross-linguistic variation in the morphosyntax and semantics of grammatical number (Corbett 2000 a.o.). Data from minoritized languages, however, have only recently started featuring in generative work on number, with results which are already influential. For example, the investigation of verbal number suppletion patterns in Hiaki (Uto-Aztecan) revealed that not only functional heads, but also lexical roots can undergo suppletion (Bobaljik & Harley 2017). Recent research on the morphological expression of number in Kiowa-Tanoan languages and Kipsigis (Nilotic) provides evidence (absent in European languages) for a binary representation of number features (Harbour 2007, Kouneli 2021). Papers which discuss work on number-related phenomena in minoritized languages are, therefore, welcomed to this session.

Initial consonant mutation: There are a number of languages (see Iosad 2010) in which morpheme-initial consonants undergo a phonologically regular alternation conditioned principally by morphosyntactic factors. As an interface-crossing phenomenon with complex interactions both in the morphosyntax and the phonology, mutation has the potential to be highly informative on the implementational details of linguistic theories at many levels, e.g. cross-modular communication, categoricity and adjacency in syntax, the phonological identity and selection of exponents. Yet, despite their readily apparent importance and wide-ranging implications, mutation phenomena are relatively understudied. This situation is a consequence of mutation phenomena being attested almost entirely in regional and minority languages (e.g. Welsh), and the body of existing research is reflective of the general attention received by these languages. This state of affairs is undesirable both from the perspective of theory-development and sociopolitical linguistic responsibility. Submissions which allow for a widening of open discussions relating to the number of challenges and opportunities presented by research on mutations against the backdrop of minority language status and/or minoritising effects on linguistic communities are, thus, welcomed.

Contact Maria Kouneli (maria.kouneli@uni-leipzig.de) with any questions.

Contrastive focalization: Challenges and solutions

Current cartographic analyses of contrastive focalization maintain that in root clauses contrastive foci move to the specifier of a unique left-peripheral FocusP projection, a position also targeted by wh-phrases. This movement is claimed to be required for interpretative reasons, and, therefore, it is obligatory, albeit covert rather than overt wherever necessary (Rizzi 1997, 2017:335-336; Rizzi & Cinque 2016; Rizzi & Bocci 2017).

These theoretical tenets make several substantial predictions. Some have been widely discussed, such as the availability of at most one contrastive focus per clause, due to the uniqueness of FocusP, or the complementary distribution of wh-phrases and foci, due to the impossibility of hosting both in SpecFocusP at once (Bocci et al 2018). But many other equally significant and potentially highly informative predictions are seldom addressed, or not discussed in relation to FocusP. Some of them are described below.

Focus size – Only phrasal constituents can move to a specifier. Therefore, contrastively focused heads cannot move to SpecFocusP, leaving their focalization unaccounted for. Intuitively promising solutions, such as movement to the head of FocusP, dissolve on closer inspection. For example, in “I have (only) SPOKENF to Mary (not HIRED her)”, ‘have’ blocks head-movement to FocusP. How should we analyse focused heads, then? The overall size of phrasal foci is also restricted. Anything larger than FocusP, such as a ‘why’ question, should be unable to contrastively focalize. Is this the case?
Focus multiplicity – The uniqueness of FocusP places an upper bound to the number of foci, yet research shows that clauses may host more than one focus (Krifka 1991, 2008; Beck & Vasishth 2009; Wagner 2009, 2020). A related challenge comes from the existence of foci nested inside other foci (Neeleman & Szendrői 2004). The containing focus may move to SpecFocusP and be interpreted there, but where is the contained focus supposed to be interpreted?
Positional restrictions – Phrases generated higher than FocusP, such as hanging topics (Benincà 2001; Benincà & Poletto 2004; Giorgi 2015), or generated in a separate clause, as CLLD-topics in ellipsis-based analyses (Ott 2015; Fernandez-Sanchez 2016), should be unable to focus, as downward and trans-clausal movement is banned. Yet contrastive topics are often analysed as involving focalization (Büring 1997; Krifka 2008; Rooth 2016) and focalized hanging topics have been claimed to exist (Samek-Lodovici, to appear). How should we account for them?

These predictions, and the challenges they pose, are all the more compelling when considering that the most widely accepted model for the interpretation of focused phrases, namely Rooth (1985, 1992), assumes interpretation in-situ, rather than movement to a specific position (Rooth 1992, 2016; Wagner 2020: section 3.16). This makes it all the more necessary for linguists to examine whether our current analysis properly accounts for the full distribution of contrastive focalization and what adjustments, if any, might be necessary.

This workshop aims at addressing these issues and, by so doing, strengthening our analysis of contrastive focalization, and widening its empirical scope. Welcome contributions may describe focalization phenomena that challenge current assumptions on FocusP, or, conversely, explain how those assumptions, with or without minimal adjustments, do account for phenomena that might at first appear to challenge them.

Contact Vieri Samek-Lodovici (v.samek-lodovici@ucl.ac.uk) with any questions.

Agents: Grammar or roots?

In neoconstructionist models, argument structure information is not projected from the lexical properties of roots, so that a priori any root could be merged in any syntactic configuration (Marantz, 1997, 2013; Borer 2005). The fact that not all roots can appear in all configurations or that roots involved in verbs that are usually described as unergative, unaccusative, or transitive exhibit different syntactic behavior according to the configuration in which they appear, raises important questions for the architecture of grammar and the lexicon-syntax interface. The role played by the lexical root in determining the expression of argument structure and event structure (cf. Harley 2014 and replies in the same Theoretical Linguistics volume; Beavers & Koontz-Garboden 2020), and its phrase-structural status, whether complements, modifiers, both or whether they are different from the other elements in the structure (Alexiadou & Lohndal 2017), are crucial in determining the internal structure and compositionality of verb meanings.

Among the linguistic notions that challenge views on this division of labour between grammar and the semantic properties of roots is that of the external argument, and particularly that of the agent, a well-researched concept, but still poorly understood. On the one hand, in the lexicalist tradition, the entailment of an agent is a property of the lexical item (Dowty 1991), and more recently, syntactically-driven approaches have revamped this intuition —cf. Ausensi’s (2021) proposal that agentivity is encoded in the formal semantics of verbal roots like MURDER. On the other hand, (neo-)constructionist approaches are showing that (non-)agentivity can be licensed by the configuration itself. For instance, Folli & Harley (2008) observe how (non-)agentivity in activity verbs can be related to a particle in English (e.g., agentive eat vs (non-)agentive eat up) and a reflexive pronoun in Italian (e.g., agentive mangiare ‘eat’ vs (non-)agentive mangiarsi ‘eat.REFL’). Similarly, Borer (2013:163 ) demonstrates how frequency adverbials agentivize otherwise non-obligatorily agentive perception verbs (e.g., {Kim/The wall} touched the fence for years / {Kim/*The wall} touched the fence twice (in two days)).

In this workshop we would like to explore the notion of agent in relation to the difference between conceptual content and grammatically represented meaning. Specific questions are: Is agentivity a property of the root or rather a derived notion that emerges as an epiphenomenon that can be encoded configurationally? How do we account for the relationship between agency/animacy effects and the structure of the VP? What is the role of eventivity/stativity in that interaction? For theories that view agents as grammatically licensed, are all external arguments inserted in Spec, Voice? For instance, Tollan (2016, 2018) on Polynesian languages and Tollan and Oxford (2018) on Algonquian suggest that different types of external arguments are merged in different sites, based on both syntactic and semantic considerations. For theories entertaining the licensing of agents as a property of the root, is there any redundancy between the grammatical representation and the formal semantics encoded in the root?

Contact Víctor Acedo-Matellán (victor.acedo-matellan@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk) with any questions.

Contact

If you have any questions about abstract submissions or about the conference, you can contact us at conference@lagb.org.uk