HomePossession and its expressions: Corpus linguistics, specialised languages, translation, acquisition/learning
Possession and its expressions: Corpus linguistics, specialised languages, translation, acquisition/learning
La possession et ses expressions : Linguistique de corpus, langues de spécialité, traduction, acquisition/apprentissage
Published on Friday, September 27, 2024
Abstract
The aim of this conference is to examine the notion of possession and its various forms (alienable/inalienable possession, part-whole relationships), with a focus on corpus linguistics. Given the advent of the theoretical framework of Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995), and in the era of digital humanities, new statistical methods (calculations of sparsity, density of occurrences, productivity, visualisations with decision trees, etc.) have emerged. This enables multifactorial analyses to be proposed on the basis of large amounts of data.
Announcement
Argument
The aim of this conference is to examine the notion of possession and its various forms (alienable/inalienable possession, part-whole relationships), with a focus on corpus linguistics. Given the advent of the theoretical framework of Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995), and in the era of digital humanities, new statistical methods (calculations of sparsity, density of occurrences, productivity, visualisations with decision trees, etc.) have emerged (cf. among others Van Wettere 2018; Goldberg 2019). This enables multifactorial analyses to be proposed on the basis of large amounts of data. It’s a fact that there are many studies about the notion of possession and its derivatives (for an overview, see, among others, Heine 1997; Herslund & Baron 2001; McGregor 2009; Dixon 2010), which have addressed fundamental questions such as the ‘conceptual’ or ‘linguistic’ nature of possessive relations, their (lack of) unity, and the diversity of strategies used to express them (genitive structures, prepositions, the verb to have and related verbs, etc.), whether from a monolingual, comparative or typological perspective. Yet, few studies are based on quantified corpus data. One of the main aims of the conference is precisely to fill this gap, by inviting contributions that put to the test the assertions made in the existing literature (which are based mostly on introspection) regarding actual use of the various mechanisms encoding possessive relations (in the broad sense). Studies – in synchrony or diachrony – on one, two or more languages, either of the same family or of different families, will be welcome. These may approach possessive and partitive relations from different theoretical points of view or fields ((formal) syntax, semantics, morphology, cognitive linguistics, pragmatics, etc., and their intersections), and focus on one or more linguistic manifestations (adnominal / predicative / external possessive constructions, morphological (non) marking of inalienable possessive relations, genitives, suffixation, so-called ‘possessive’ verbs, etc.). Studies in descriptive linguistics which are not based on corpus data (Godard 1986; Zribi-Hertz 2003) will also be evaluated, provided that they either address new questions on the subject or ‘classic’ questions treated from an original angle.
Furthermore, contrastive approaches, using data from parallel corpora, may address problems specific to the field of translation (including machine translation): how, in the target language, are structures encoding (in)alienable possession and part-whole relations (including meronymy, cf. Cruse 1986) translated from the source language? What is the degree of (lexical) overlap between structures in different languages that have superficially the same syntax (Van Peteghem 2006)?
While the main interest of the conference lies in the use and analysis of corpus data, these may present, at the socio-cultural level, diastratic or diatopic differences that are interesting to examine, or come from specialised languages, such as law (but not exclusively). Legal corpora – legislation or case law – in one language or in a cross-linguistic perspective can provide interesting data on the linguistic expression of possession in the legal sense.
Finally, papers on the acquisition of possessive structures or the way in which language disorders can affect their use and comprehension (psycholinguistic dimension) will be welcome, as well as papers in the field of didactics, addressing issues specific to the acquiring of possessive structures in a foreign language (such as French as a foreign language: Fabricius-Hansen et al. 2017) or in the native language (Chiss & David 2018). Submissions on the expression of possession in sign language will also be considered.
The conference is intended to be interdisciplinary, in line with the cross-disciplinary dimension of the ‘Cross-disciplinary Unit’ of UPHF’s “Laboratoire de Recherche Sociétés & Humanités”, bringing together several disciplines – linguistics, translation studies, law (legal language: expression of possession in legal texts), acquisition and didactics – with a focus on digital resources.
Submission procedures
Your proposal must not exceed 2000 words (excluding bibliography) and must be submitted on the symposium website (after login, see “My Submissions” tab): https://possession.sciencesconf.org/
Before January 12, 2025
Languages: French and English
Provisional timetable
- 1st call: September 23, 2024
- Deadline for receipt of proposals: January 12, 2025
- Notification of authors: end of June 2025
- Programme & registration: September 2025
- Conference: December 3, 4 and 5, 2025
Organising committee
- Angelina Aleksandrova (Université Paris-Cité)
- Véronique Lagae (UPHF)
- Vassil Mostrov (UPHF)
- Fayssal Tayalati (Université de Lille)
Scientific committee
- Anne Abeillé
- Artemis Alexiadou
- Michel Aurnague
- Sandra Benazzo
- Thomas Bertin
- Olivier Bonami
- Bert Capelle
- Marie Collombel
- Céline Corteel
- Denis Creissels
- Georgette Da
- Guillume Desagulier
- Carine Duteuil
- Luca Gasparri
- Martin Hilpert
- Richard Huyghe
- Marie-Laurence Knittel
- Mohamed Lahrouchi
- Peter Lauwers
- Dominique Legalllois
- Suzanne Lesage
- Rudy Loock
- Elise Mignot
- Fabio Montermini
- Katia Paykin
- Nicolas Quint
- Mathilde Salles
- Laure Sarda
- Catherine Schnedecker
- Elena Soare
- Dejan Stosic
- Delphine Tribout
- Mark Van de Velde
Subjects
- Language (Main category)
- Mind and language > Language > Linguistics
Places
- Valenciennes, France (59)
Event attendance modalities
Full on-site event
Date(s)
- Sunday, January 12, 2025
Attached files
Keywords
- possession, linguistique, corpus
Contact(s)
- fayssal Tayalati
courriel : fayssal [dot] tayalati [at] univ-lille [dot] fr - Vassil Mostrov
courriel : vassil [dot] mostrov [at] uphf [dot] fr
Reference Urls
Information source
- Angelina Aleksandrova
courriel : angelina [dot] aleksandrova [at] u-paris [dot] fr
License
This announcement is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal.
To cite this announcement
« Possession and its expressions: Corpus linguistics, specialised languages, translation, acquisition/learning », Call for papers, Calenda, Published on Friday, September 27, 2024, https://doi.org/10.58079/12dan
