[SlawKaus] SLE Workshop on overabundance and defectivity (with an emphasys on Slavic and Finno-Ugric)

[Roncero, Kristian]

Dear all,


My department in Sheffield is co-organising this workshop for the next SLE 2023 edition. Given that there is an emphasys on Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages, I am sharing this here. In case you may be interested in this or know someone who may be interested in it, here are the details.


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SLE initial call to mailing lists and individuals:


Dear colleagues,


We're proposing a workshop for the Societas Linguistica Europaea 2023 conference entitled "Re-evaluating the relationship between defectivity and overabundance" and would like to invite relevant contributions as below.


(The 56th Annual Meeting of SLE will take place from 29 August – 1 September 2023

at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens; see the meeting website for details<https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2023/second-call-for-papers/>.)


We welcome submissions of abstracts from researchers at any level of seniority who are working on overabundance (morphological variation within paradigm cells) and defectivity (paradigmatic gaps); postgraduate students and postdoctoral fellows are especially encouraged to submit. We aim to have the workshop consider the phenomena under investigation in a diverse range of languages and relevant sub-fields (see below for a fuller description);  that said, this work derives largely from a project focused on the Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages, so further work on these languages would be very welcome, as would work expanding the scope of our enquiry to other languages across the world.


Interested colleagues should submit a 300-word abstract by 8 November 2022 to n.bermel at sheffield.ac.uk. We will make selections and inform all presenters of acceptance of their abstracts before the workshop proposal is submitted to the Society.


Best regards,

Neil Bermel

Dunstan Brown


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Workshop description:


There is an increasing body of research on defectivity (paradigm gaps) and overabundance (multiple forms filling the same paradigm cell, termed variously ‘competing’, ‘doublet’ or ‘rival’ forms). Both phenomena reveal important insights into how linguistic morphology works, in particular in relation to where the non-deterministic application of rules is acceptable and to the basis for speakers’ certainty about which rules to apply.


Many accounts of defectivity start from the observation that multiple possibilities for the realisation of a form create clashes that lead to a paradigm gap (Hudson 2000), although recent studies have problematised this explanation (Sims 2015). Overabundance has frequently been dealt with in the literature as a case of semantic/functional overdifferentiation or variation conditioned along various axes (Brown 2007, Thornton 2012). However, the existence of non-conditioned overabundance presents an alternative and well-attested outcome in a diverse range of languages (Thornton 2019:224), thereby indicating that defectivity is thus not the only potential resolution of such a clash. More investigation is needed to understand the ways these two phenomena are treated by learners and language users, the theoretical dimensions along which these two phenomena relate to each other, and the ways they can be represented in descriptions of language aimed at the public.


This workshop considers the extent to which the associated properties of defectivity and overabundance overlap by bringing together researchers working on paradigm gaps and rival forms in a variety of sub-fields, including corpus linguistics, historical linguistics, child language, language planning, morphology, typology, computational modelling, psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. It is open to researchers from a broad variety of languages and perspectives.


References:


Brown, Dunstan. 2007. Peripheral functions and overdifferentiation: the Russian second locative. Russian Linguistics 31, 61-76.

Hudson, Richard. 2000. I amn’t. Language 76(2), 297–323. https://doi.org/10.2307/417658

Sims, Andrea. 2015. Inflectional defectiveness. Cambridge: CUP.

Thornton, Anna. 2011. Overabundance (multiple forms realizing the same cell): a non-canonical phenomenon in Italian verb morphology. In Maiden, Martin et al. (eds.), Morphological autonomy, 358-381. Oxford: OUP.

Thornton, Anna. 2019. Overabundance: a canonical typology. In Rainer, Franz et al. (eds.), Competition in inflection and word-formation, 223-258. Studies in Morphology 5. Dordrecht: Springer.



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Kristian Roncero [ro̞nˈθe̞ɾo̞] (he, him)
Postdoctoral researcher

MPI-EVA, Abteilung für Sprach- und Kulturevolution
University of Sheffield, School of Languages and Cultures
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