Workshop on typological profiles of language families of South Asia

Uppsala University
15-16 Sept 2016
Location: Gustavianum (Auditorium Minus)

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Program
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Organisation

The goal of this workshop is to create a forum to discuss issues concerning the typological profiles of the major language families of South Asia. South Asia is home to 743 languages (“Living languages”; “Count” source: http://www.ethnologue.com) belonging to four major language families (Indo-European [mostly Indo-Aryan], Tibeto-Burman, Austro-Asiatic and Dravidian) and some minor language families (including language isolates). Despite this multitude of languages and language families, the typological profiles of even the major language families are not well covered in the literature. A more insightful discussion of the typological profiles of at least the major South Asian language families will also help us in our studies relating to, among others, language typology, language contact and language change.

Confirmed speakers thus far:

  • Gregory Andersson (Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages)
  • Paul Arsenault (Tyndale University College)
  • Bernard Comrie (UCSB) & Raoul Zamponi
  • Michael Dunn (Uppsala University)
  • Scott DeLancey (University of Oregon)
  • Sonal Kulkarni-Joshi (Deccan College)
  • Henrik Liljegren (Stockholm University)
  • Anju Saxena (Uppsala University) & Lars Borin (University of Gothenburg)
  • Claus Peter Zoller (Oslo University)

We invite researchers to submit abstracts for presentations at the workshop. The following topics illustrate the kinds of themes being considered, all with empirical data from SA languages.

  • Fine-grained typological analysis of one or more South Asian language families using WALS-type features
  • Large-scale quantitative study of some linguistic aspect of a language family
  • Comparative lexical study using computational methods
  • Distribution of selected grammatical features within or across a language family
  • Large-scale dialect survey of a language
  • Deviating linguistic patterns within a language family
  • Methodological challenges in doing large-scale comparisons
  • Collecting and processing data for large-scale comparisons

Important dates

Deadline for abstract submission: 15 December 2015
Notification of acceptance: 30 January 2016
Deadline for registration: 25 August 2016
Workshop: 15-16 September 2016

Abstracts should be one (A4 or letter) page long. A second page may be included for references and/or data. Abstracts – in pdf format only – should be sent to:
<anju(d)saxena(at)lingfil(d)uu(d)se>
(change the parenthesized expressions into the appropriate characters)

Acknowledgement

Funding for this workshop is provided by the Forum for South Asian Studies and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.

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