Conferences

Workshop #4 - Individual Differences in Pragmatic Processing

The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers from different theoretical and methodological backgrounds to explore the nature, sources, and consequences of individual differences in pragmatic processing. A central motivation is to understand how such differences shape synchronic variation in interpretation and use, and how they may, under certain conditions, feed into processes of semantic reanalysis and change.

Workshop #3 - Variation and Change in Present-Day Istriot

The goal of this workshop is to unite scholars studying Istriot, an endangered, lesser-known Romance variety spoken in parts of Istria, Croatia. This Romance “island” surrounded by Slavic-speaking areas can act as a linguistic laboratory for various approaches to language contact and change, some of which will be showcased here.

Lecture #3 - From the corpus to the lab: Assessing the role of extravagance in language change

The concept of extravagance, i.e. the maxim "talk in such a way that you are noticed" (Keller 1994, Haspelmath 1999), has recently been invoked to explain multiple language chage phenomena, including e.g. the development of the English progressive (Petré 2017) or German quantifier/degree-modifier constructions (Neels et al. 2023).

Workshop #2 - Artificial Language in the Linguist's Toolbox

The aim of this workshop is to explore the scope of artificial languages as a tool in linguistic research. In particular, we are interested in the implications of different AL training methods and learning outcomes for possible application areas of ALs within different subfields of linguistics and concerning multifaceted research questions.

Lecture #2 - Dynamics of Functional Change

In the talk will be presented the planning for a project that develops methods to track linguistic changes’ spread within language and withing speech community in historical corpora using large language models and statistical methods from ecology.

Workshop #1 - Bridging contexts in semantic change

The concept of bridging context is central to the study of semantic change. It is well known that the transition from meaning A to B always involves a phase of polysemy, in which both meanings coexist in one form. Bridging contexts, partly corresponding to what Diewald (2002) terms critical contexts, are contexts that allow for an interpretation in terms of either the original meaning or a new meaning (cf. Evans & Wilkins 2000, Heine 2002). Such contextual settings are regarded as “the places where extended meanings commonly have their genesis” (Evans & Wilkins 2000: 550).

Lecture # 1 - Experimental methods for meaning variation and change: the case of the Imperfective domain in Spanish

Variation within the Spanish Imperfective domain partially responds to the Progressive-to-Imperfective diachronic shift (Dahl 1985, Bybee et al. 1994). Spanish had originally only one imperfective marker (the Simple Present (PRES)) that expressed both habitual and event-in-progress readings, until it developed a Present Progressive marker (PROG) to express the event-in-progress reading (emergence stage). Over time, these markers became restricted to mutually exclusive readings (categoricalization stage): PRES for habituals; PROG for events-in-progress. This stage is expected to last until PROG gets reanalyzed as a general imperfectivity marker (generalization stage), becoming the only device to express both readings (Deo 2015).

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