Canonical Typology

Workshop on Creating Infrastructure for Canonical Typology

There is a growing movement within linguistics to promote the use of ontologies for linguistic description. However, differences in terminology and underlying logic are major stumbling blocks. One way of addressing these problems is to adopt the canonical approach to typology 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.

In January 2009 we hosted a two-day international workshop Creating Infrastructure for Canonical Typology,which addressed the issues relevant for the theory and practice of the Canonical Typology approach. It brought together computational linguists, fieldworkers and typologists, as well as researchers working on ontologies. Some papers appeared a volume on the subject:

Brown, Dunstan, Marina Chumakina & Greville G.Corbett (eds). 2013. Canonical morphology and syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Workshop programme

Friday 09 January 2009

10:00-10:30 Refreshments and arrival
10:30-10:45 Dunstan Brown (Surrey), Introduction
10:45-11:30 Greville G. Corbett (Surrey), Canonical morphosyntactic features
11:30-12:30 Frank Seifart (Regensburg), Towards a multidimensional typology of nominal classification
12:30-13:15 Lunch
13:15-14:00 Anna Siewierska (Lancaster), Refining the canonical characterization of the passive
14:00-15:00 Nicholas Evans (ANU), Rare but useful: the canons 'direct' and 'indirect' in reported speech typology
15:00-15:30 Coffee break
15:30-16:15 Martin Everaert (Utrecht), Canonical typology: the case of reflexivization
16:15-17:00 Irina Nikolaeva (SOAS), Towards a typology of finiteness: a canonical approach
17:00-18:00 Reception
19:00 Dinner

 

Saturday 10 January 2009

09:00-09:45 Andrew Spencer (Essex) & Ana Luis (Coimbra), On clitics and canons
09:45-10:30 (Adam Schembri (UCL) & Kearsy Cormier (UCL), Canonical typology of person agreement: Evidence from signed languages
10:30-11:00 Coffee break
11:00-11:45 Irina Nikolaeva (SOAS) & Andrew Spencer (Essex), Canons and the Possession-Modification Scale
11:45-12:30 Oliver Bond (SOAS), Infrastructure requires a foundation: a base for the canons of negation
12:30-13:30 Lunch
13:30-14:15 Dorothee Beermann Hellan (Trondheim), From interlinearized glossing to standard annotation
14:15-15:00 Jiajin Xu (Lancaster), Corpus informed approach to Canonical Typology
15:00-15:15 Coffee break
15:15-16:00 Alexis Dimitriadis (Utrecht), An extensible design for linguistic survey databases
16:00-17:00 Scott Farrar (Washington), Using canonical typology to achieve e-Linguistics
17:00 Concluding remarks
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