The CRISCO research centre is delighted to announce the Call for Papers of the international conference “Information Structure and Language Change”, to be held at Université de Caen Normandie, April 3-5 2018.

Why:
Advance the current understanding of the general role(s) of Information Structure for language change, with focus on word order evolution in Germanic and Romance

What:
Two-page anonymous abstract, spelling out the research problem and background, the notions and criteria, the method and data, the key findings and their relevance for the meeting; irrespective of theoretical persuasion, abstracts are expected to spell out an explanatory dimension with a strong empirical support. Indication as to whether a poster presentation could be considered. By October 1st.

Who:
Keynote speakers: Adam Ledgeway (Cambridge);
Confirmed interest: Patricia Amaral (Indiana), Andreas Dufter (Munich), Maj-Britt Hansen (Manchester), Véronique Lagae (Valenciennes), Manuel Leonetti (Alcalá), Ans van Kemenade (Radboud), Cecilia Poletto (Frankfurt/Pavia), Sophie Prévost (ENS), Malte Rosemeyer (Leuven), Ioanna Sitaridou (Cambridge), Rosanna Sornicola (Naples), Elisabeth Stark (Zurich), George Walkden (Manchester), Sam Wolfe (Oxford);
Programme committee: Theresa Biberauer (Stellenbosch/Cambridge), Susann Fischer (Hamburg), Chiara Gianollo (Bologna), Adam Ledgeway (Cambridge), Bettelou Los (Edinburgh), Scott Schwenter (Ohio), Graeme Trousdale (Edinburgh), Marit Westergaard (Tromsø)

Research into language change has identified a number of determinant factors. There is a growing body of evidence that change affecting major syntactic phenomena like word order involves an informational dimension at some stage(s) of the process. This has been claimed to apply to the prototypical syntactic marking of speech-acts (in situ partial interrogatives, loss of inversion for total interrogatives in French), V2 loss (e.g. work by A. van Kemenade & B. Los for English), increasing contextual restriction of OV order (e.g. Taylor & Pintzuk 2012 for English) and Stylistic Fronting (work by Fischer i.a.). While local correlations between word-order change and information structure have been observed, conditions of interface between the two orders of representation remain to be established. The idea that configurations satisfy informational requirements when they lose syntactic currency seems conceptually appealing in explaining how such configurations become marked (on a recent approach to marked and default word order, see e.g. Biberauer 2016). Whether a characterised informational value is the cause or the consequence of change in syntactic currency remains to be empirically assessed however, requiring a robust diagnostic of informational value in historical resources that reliably reflect effective change.

The purpose of this conference is to advance the current understanding of the general role(s) of Information Structure for language change. The focus is on word order evolution in Germanic and Romance. Proposals are invited, spelling out the research problem and background, the notions and criteria, the method and data, the key findings and their relevance for the meeting. Irrespective of theoretical persuasion, abstracts are expected to spell out an explanatory dimension with a strong empirical support. The two-page anonymous abstract is to be submitted in the Easychair page of the conference ; an indication should be provided of whether a poster presentation could be considered. A notification of the programme committee decision will be sent at the beginning of December 2017, and the draft versions of papers will be expected before the conference, for distribution among participants. A selection of papers is expected to be published.

Calendar
October 1st 2017 : Deadline for abstract submission
December 1st 2017 : Notification from Programme Committee
December 15 2017 : Publication of programme
March 15 2018 : Deadline for reception of draft papers for circulation
April 3-5 2018 : Conference