The conference revolves around the relationship between the analysis of (cross-)linguistic variation and data. More specifically, we aim to investigate how the kinds of data typologists use bias the theories of language we develop out of cross-linguistic comparisons and typological generalizations. Often, typological studies are grounded in data that do not reflect naturally occurring (spoken) language and tend to leave aside sociolinguistic variation.
Typology is generally thought to differ from formal approaches in the empirical nature of its data, which are not self-constructed, isolated sentences based on intuition, but rather naturally occurring language attested in the world’s languages (Levinson & Evans 2010, among others). However, a closer look indicates that typological data are, in general, rarely based on spontaneous speech (see Bisang 2004 for a discussion and Dingemanse et al. 2015 and Floyd et al. 2018 for some exceptions). They are indeed more frequently elicited by means of well-established techniques, such as traditional/personal stories, narratives, Bible translations, sentences to translate, structured interviews, etc., with an evident lack of dialogical conversations, in favor of monological productions. This holds both for data constituting the basis for descriptive grammars and for data collected in multilingual corpora (cf., DoReCo – http://doreco.info/ - and Multi-CAST – https://multicast.aspra.uni-bamberg.de/), which have the great advantage of making corpus data accessible but suffer from the same limits in terms of types of communicative situations recorded and transcribed. In other words, we observe a mismatch between the usage-based and corpus-based approach which lies at the foundations of linguistic typology and the degree to which spontaneous data are actually used, with a good amount of typological data being certainly not self-constructed, but not naturally occurring either. Our question is to what extent the empirical choices of fieldworkers and typologists impact the nature, scope, and theories of typological universals.
Variationist sociolinguistics is one of the branches of linguistics that has given more attention to naturally occurring data (also from a methodological perspective, see Tagliamonte 2006 inter al.). It has also been shown that the overall linguistic picture may change if we take into consideration different varieties of language leading in some cases to the discovery of universal (or cross-linguistic) tendencies that inherently characterize non-standard varieties (cf. the notion of vernacular universals, i.e. “a small number of phonological and grammatical processes [which] recur in vernaculars wherever they are spoken” Chambers 2003: 128), and to the detection of common features even across typologically distant languages (see Auer & Maschler 2013 on Modern Hebrew and German). As pointed out early on by Labov, the “vernacular” (i.e., informal and spontaneous speech) is the very place where “fundamental relations which determine the course of linguistic evolution” (1972: 208) can be observed. An objective of this workshop is to investigate if and how typology can benefit from the analysis of sociolinguistically informed naturally occurring data.
The conference aims at answering (some of) the following theoretical and methodological questions:
Do typological data (i.e., data from descriptive grammars) represent adequate empirical data for the scientific purposes of the discipline? If not, how can we improve the data typologists work with?
Might the typological analysis of different types of data, e.g. spontaneous conversations, lead to the identification of new cross-linguistic tendencies and universals?
How does the partially artificial nature of data impact the reliability and scope of typological investigations?
How can we shed light on the structural distance among varieties of the same language by taking into account their difference with regard to typological parameters?
What methodological precautions should be taken when comparing these kinds of data?
Which relevance could vernacular universals have from a typological perspective and what is their relationship to “traditional” universals?
Which advantages could typology bring to sociolinguistics in order to allow for cross- linguistic comparisons?
In which way might the bridging of typology and sociolinguistics provide us with a deeper understanding of language variation?
Which methods could be applied to building multilingual corpora of spontaneous speech?
What strategies might be adopted to make monolingual corpora more suitable for typological (or cross-linguistic) analysis?