Creating Infrastructure For Canonical Typology
9 January 2009 - 10 January 2009
Conference hosted by the Surrey Morphology Group.
Papers are invited for a two-day conference addressing issues relevant for the creation of an online infrastructure for Canonical Typology (Corbett 2005, 2006). Linguists’ intuitions about what are particular instances of a phenomenon, such as a case or agreement, can differ because of differences in the choice of criteria which they take to be definitional. The canonical approach allows us to address these differences by taking defining properties and placing them in a multidimensional space. In this way, we can treat, for example, issues of whether particular constructions fit under the rubric ‘agreement’ or ‘case’ as a matter of greater or lesser proximity to a canonical ideal. An ontology for this approach therefore requires a mapping out of the criteria that linguistic typologists use for defining linguistic constructs.
The Surrey Morphology Group proposes to bring together linguists from different perspectives to outline the issues relevant for the creation of an ontology for Canonical Typology in the form of a Community of Practice Extension (COPE) within the GOLD ontology for linguistics (Farrar and Langendoen 2003; see also: www.linguistics-ontology.org/gold.html). Contributions may address the following issues: the canonical criteria for defining different morphosyntactic features (case, gender, number, etc.); defining canonical criteria for syntax-morphology interaction (agreement, government, head, modifier, etc.); practical issues for the fieldworker; issues of computational implementation and reasoning. We invite papers on these and related topics from computational linguists, fieldworkers, typologists, as well as researchers working on ontologies. p>
Confirmed speakers:
- Nicholas Evans (Australian National University)
- Scott Farrar (University of Washington)
- Frank Seifart (Ruhr-Universität Bochum)
Anonymous abstracts (500 word maximum) should be sent as an attachment by e-mail to a.kibort@surrey.ac.uk by 29 August 2008, with contact information contained in the body of the message. Notification of acceptance will be sent by October 31, 2008. Any questions may also be sent to the above address.
References
Corbett, Greville G. 2005. The canonical approach in typology. In: Zygmunt Frajzyngier, Adam Hodges and David S. Rood (eds) Linguistic Diversity and Language Theories. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 25-49.
Corbett, Greville G. 2006. Agreement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Farrar, Scott and D. Terence Langendoen .2003. A linguistic ontology for the Semantic Web. GLOT International 7 (3), 97 - 100.
The workshop will be held at the University of Surrey, in Guildford, UK. Guildford is a market town in the Green Belt surrounding London and is located about 35 minutes by train from central London and within easy reach of London's Heathrow and Gatwick airports.