Voice systems in diachrony: a comparative perspective

Pavia, 11 September 2014

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Workshop Description:

Voice systems have been thoroughly studied, both in a crosslinguistic and a variational perspective (Siewierska 1984, Comrie 1985, Keenan & Dryer 2007, Perlmutter & Rosen 1984, Foley & Van Valin 1985, Shibatani 1985, 1988, Tsunoda 1988, Klaiman 1991, Kemmer 1993, Fox & Hopper 1994, Barðdal 2004, Creissels 2007, Austin & Musgrave 2008, Adelaar 2013, among others).
Albeit less extensively, diachronic aspects of specific voice patterns in individual languages have also been discussed (Cennamo 1993, 2005, 2007, 2012, Allen 2001, Ross 2002, Faarlund 2005, Abraham 2006b, Ottosson 2008, Kulikov 2006, Eythòrsson 2008, Toyota 2008, van Gelderen 2011 and contributions in Wouk & Ross 2002, Abraham & Leisiö 2006, Malchukov & Siewierska 2011, van Gelderen, Cennamo & Barðdal 2013, among others).
A comprehensive comparative dimension on diachronic issues in the domain of voice, however, is still largely unexplored, both within individual languages and across different language families and types.
The present workshop aims at investigating voice domains from a diachronic comparative perspective, focusing on the extent and limits of variation in the development of different voice patterns/systems in typologically distant and genetically unrelated languages, aiming at identifying possible constant/invariant paths of change as well as points of divergence for one and the same strategy and/or similar clusters of strategies in the rise and evolution of voice phenomena (e.g., the reflexive-middle continuum, passives and impersonals, causativization and anticausativization, serial/auxiliary verbs as passive markers, antipassivization, inverse and focus systems).

Keynote Speaker:

Leonid Kulikov (Ghent)

Convenor: Michela Cennamo (University of Naples Federico II)
Contact: ti.aninu|mannecim#ti.aninu|mannecim [https://www.docenti.unina.it/michela.cennamo]
Venue: University of Pavia, Italy

Call for papers:

Contributions are invited, from scholars of different persuasions, on in-depth (preferably corpus-based) investigations of different aspects of the diachrony of voice systems, including (albeit not exclusively)
• the path(s) of development of reflexive-middle voice markers within and across language families and resulting changes (e.g., loss of the passive and middle reflexive and its reflexes in other domains, as in Brazilian Portuguese), the relationship between the spread of the reflexive in impersonal function and its referential scope, pleonastic reflexives and split intransitivity
• auxiliarization/serialization and the rise of voice auxiliaries/markers
• periphrastic passives and changes in tense-aspectual systems, with copula auxiliarization (Dik 1987) as one possible initial stage in the grammaticalization of lexical verbs as voice markers
• the interplay of (tense-)aspectual and argument structure factors in determining the rise of new voice systems
• the emergence of resultative and passive participles and their relationship with the voice system(s) of individual languages
• the role played by language contact in the emergence of new voice patterns
• the rise and development of 'transimpersonals' (Malchukov 2008) in different language families (e.g., Indo-European, Amerindian and Australian languages) and the verb classes involved
• steps and parameters in the rise and development of passive and impersonal constructions (e.g., grammaticalization of existential verbs, types of indefinite/impersonal markers) (Siewierska 2010, Bugaeva 2011, Malchukov & Siewierska 2011)
• changes and paths of change in the coding of the focus systems in the focus voice types

Submissions
Abstracts are invited for 20-minute talks (plus 10 min. discussion).
They should be no longer than two pages, including examples and references (1 inch margin all around, font 12 pt, notes 10).
Please send Word / Open Office / Word Perfect files and use Unicode fonts.

Dates:

8 March 2014: Deadline for abstract submission
8 April 2014: Notification of acceptance
11 September 2014: Workshop

References
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