International Workshop : Diachronic Morphosyntax in South American Languages (DiaSAL)

Lyon, 28-30 May 2015

Workshop description

In recent years, we have seen exciting advances in historical studies in the indigenous languages of South America: a series of conferences on this topic in the last decade culminated in special issues of the Boletím do Museu Emilio Goeldi (Galucio & Muysken 2007) and International Journal of American Linguistics (Galucio & Gildea 2010), and many of the presentations at the recent Amazonicas V conference in Belém, Brazil, were on the topic of historical linguistics. However, reconstruction of morphosyntactic patterns depends on detailed modern descriptions, which have historically been lacking in South America, and on solid methods, which have generally been more disputed than not. We believe that the quality and quantity of descriptive work in many languages of South America has reached the critical mass necessary for historical work in grammatical patterns; the availability of this expanded database coincides with advances in our ability to identify cognate constructions and reconstruct the source constructions that give rise to them.

The goal of this workshop is to give scholars a venue to explore the diachrony of any kind of morphosyntactic pattern in a language or language family of South America. We particularly encourage papers that first identify cognate constructions across the languages of a given language family, or in different contexts within the grammar of a single well-described language. Having identified such constructional cognates, the papers could then (i) argue for the most likely source construction that could have given rise to the group of cognates, as well as (ii) explain the synchronic differences between cognate constructions by describing further changes that individual constructions have undergone.

Workshop venue

The workshop will be hosted by the Institut des Sciences de l’Homme (ISH) in Lyon (France) and is organized by the Collegium de Lyon, the Labex Advanced Studies on LANguage complexity (ASLAN) and the laboratoire Dynamique Du Language (DDL).

Organizers

• Spike Gildea (University of Oregon & Collegium de Lyon)
• Antoine Guillaume (Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage).

Call for papers

Abstracts will be accepted by email attachment, in English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese.

We also expect to publish a refereed volume of selected papers from the workshop, probably in English.

Deadline for receipt of abstracts: 30 November, 2014.

Abstracts will be evaluated and either accepted or rejected by 5 December, 2014.

On the basis of the accepted abstracts, we will prepare an application for external funding to offset some of the costs of attendance for those who might otherwise be unable to participate. In the body of the email containing your abstract, please let us know if you would need external funding in order to attend, and if so, for what proportion of costs (e.g., airfare, lodging, meals). Once the group of participants is identified, we will communicate further for the purpose of justifying the funding requests.

Social events

Information will be announced later.

Contact person

Spike Gildea	Antoine Guillaume
Collegium de Lyon	Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage
à l'Université de Lyon	Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage
92 rue Pasteur 69361 Lyon cedex 07 France	Institut des Sciences de l'Homme 14 avenue Berthelot 69363 LYON Cedex 07 FRANCE
	Tel No.: 33 (0)4 72 72 79 31
	Fax No.: 33 (0)4 72 72 65 90