We are pleased to announce the second installment of the conference ‘Descriptive Grammars and Typology: The chalenges of writing grammars of underdescribed and endangered languages’, which will take place on December 1-3, 2021 in Paris (FIAP Paris). We are counting on a face-to-face event complying to all sanitary restrictions that may apply (if needed, the hosting conditions will be adapted).
Abstract submission deadline: July 1st, 2021.
All details of the conference and abstract submission on the conference website:
Keynote speakers:
- Felix Ameka (Leiden University)
- Nicholas Evans (Australian National University)
- Birgit Hellwig (University of Cologne)
- Aimée Lahaussois (HTL, CNRS)
- Nicolas Quint (LLACAN, CNRS)
Call for papers:
The global endangerement of little-known languages has raised awareness of the urgent need to document and describe them and brought about new advances in the art of grammaticography (see e.g. Ameka, Dench & Evans 2006). The conference series 'Descriptive Grammars and Typology’, whose first installment took place in March 2019 in Helsinki, aims to contribute to the development of grammaticography by bringing together authors and users of grammars of underdescribed and/or endangered languages who share an interest in drawing on concepts of linguistic typology in grammatical descriptions.
We welcome submissions concentrating on the issues and challenges that face the authors of descriptive grammars, the expectations of grammar users, as well as wider discussion of the role of typology in grammar-writing. The presentations may take either a language-specific or a cross-linguistic perspective. This second edition of the conference will be more specifically focused on the theory and practice of grammar writing and will exclude papers concerned with the description of grammatical structures.
Topics relevant to the conference may include (but are not restricted to) the following issues:
- The challenges of describing a language in its own terms and, at the same time, making it comparable to other languages
- The roles of form and function in conceptualizing and organizing language descriptions
- Challenges of and approaches to describing rare structures
- The role of semantics in grammar writing
- The role of corpora in grammar writing
- Approaches to variation in language description
- The relation of language and linguistic structure to language ecologies
- Challenges and solutions for meeting the diverse needs of typologists, language learners and native speakers when writing a descriptive grammar
Organizers:
- Thera Crane (University of Helsinki)
- Sebastian Fedden (Sorbonne Nouvelle University, CNRS – LaCiTO)
- Ekaterina Gruzdeva (University of Helsinki)
- Arja Hamari (University of Helsinki)
- Matti Miestamo (University of Helsinki)
- Yann Le Moullec (Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations, CNRS – LaCiTO)
- Neige Rochant (Sorbonne Nouvelle University, CNRS – LaCiTO & LLACAN)
- Guillaume Segerer (CNRS – LLACAN)
- Jeanne Zerner (CNRS – LLACAN)
Sponsored by Labex EFL.
Program committee:
- Claire Bowern (Yale University)
- Denis Creissels (Lumière University Lyon 2)
- Don Daniels (University of Oregon)
- Patience Epps (University of Texas at Austin)
- James Essegbey (University of Florida)
- Diana Forker (Friedrich Schiller University Jena)
- Andrew Garrett (University of California, Berkeley)
- Carol Genetti (New York University Abu Dhabi)
- Nadine Grimm (University of Rochester)
- Antoine Guillaume (DDL, CNRS)
- Harald Hammarström (Uppsala University)
- Martin Haspelmath (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology)
- Jeffrey Heath (University of Michigan)
- Marian Klamer (Leiden University)
- Linda Konnerth (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
- Maarten Mous (Leiden University)
- Bastian Persohn (Friedrich Schiller University Jena)
- Mark Post (University of Sydney)
- Antoinette Schapper (CNRS /Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)