Workshop on the Loss of Inflection

Abstracts are invited for participation in a Workshop on the Loss of Inflection to be held as part of the 23rd International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL) in San Antonio, Texas (31 July - 4 August 2017).

Background

During its recorded history English has lost most of its inflection, including the morphological marking of mood, case and gender, and almost all of its person and number marking. English is far from unique in this regard: the loss of inflection has been observed in the history of a vast number of languages, representing disparate genealogical and geographical classes. At first glance this may appear to be just a matter of decay: words have got shorter, categories reduced, and meaning simplified. But closer inspection reveals that this reduction typically comes about through the interaction of innovations at all levels of grammar. At one level the result is simplification, but the processes that lead to it involve a complex series of systemic changes and the adoption of new organizing principles. Far from being just a matter of decay, the evidence so far shows that the loss of inflection follows along lines determined by paradigmatic structure, and so reveals properties of the organization of inflectional systems that might otherwise remain hidden.

The overarching research question of the workshop will thus be: what are the possible pathways of inflectional loss, and what do they reveal about the nature of inflectional systems? We particularly encourage submissions approaching this question from the following five angles:

1. What role do the morphosyntactic features themselves play? That is, are certain types of function more likely to be lost than others?

2. What is the influence of the type of morphological form? For example, are suffixes particularly prone to loss because of the particular susceptibility of word-final position to phonological weakening?

3. Could the complexity of the inflectional system itself bring about its demise?

4. Since the loss of morphological marking often goes hand-in-hand with changes in syntax, what is the relationship between the two? Does syntactic change motivate the loss of inflection, or vice versa?

5. Is the 'natural' loss of inflection different from contact-induced change?

Workshop organisers:

Helen Sims-Williams, Matthew Baerman, Oliver Bond and Greville G. Corbett (University of Surrey)

Deadline for abstracts:

1 December 2016

ICHL abstract submission guidelines:

Abstracts are invited for papers for the General Session and Workshops. Abstracts should be a maximum of two pages in length, including references, and may focus on any aspect of historical linguistics.

Abstracts should be submitted via the conference Easy Chair link (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ichl23). (If you have problems using Easy Chair, please contact us at ichl23@utsa.edu.).

Authors may present a maximum of two papers, whether single-authored or co-authored. Abstracts will be reviewed anonymously by at least three members of the Scientific Committee.

Abstracts may be submitted for the General Session or for one of the Workshops listed below. Abstracts submitted for a workshop but not accepted there will be automatically considered for inclusion in the general session.

For further details on abstract submission see http://ichl23.utsa.edu/cfp/