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 |