Call for Papers

Workshop on Sound Change Actuation

April 17-18, 2013

University of Chicago

The workshop will consist of four theme panels targeting the perceptual, articulatory, socio-indexical and computation aspects of the actuation problem in sound change. The invited speakers and discussants are:

Panels (Speaker; Discussant):

  • Perceptual factors in sound change actuation: Cynthia Clopper (Ohio State); Pam Beddor (Michigan)
  • Articulatory factors in sound change actuation: Bryan Gick (British Columbia); Jeff Mielke (Ottawa/NCSU)
  • Socio-indexical factors in sound change actuation: Rob Podesva (Stanford); Jane Stuart-Smith (Glasgow)
  • Computational modeling of sound change actuation: Janet Pierrehumbert (Northwestern); Morgan Sonderegger (McGill)/James Kirby(Edinburgh)

We invite papers any of the above aspects of the problem of actuation. Contributions are strongly encouraged, but not restricted, to address the following question:

  • What role does human agency have on the initiation and propagation of sound change?
  • How much control and free choice does a person have on which linguistic variants to use and which to reject?
  • To what extent is sound change influenced by innate neuro-cognitive factors?
  • How should individual-level effects on language be modeled within grammatical frameworks that assume the universality of linguistic abilities?

A selection of the workshop presentation will be collected for a special issue of a journal.
Submission Guidelines

  • We invited oral presentations and posters.
  • Abstracts should be no longer than two pages (12pt font) with at least 1 inch margins.
  • Talks will be 20 minutes with 10 minutes of discussion.
  • Abstracts should be emailed as an attachment (pdf format) to workshopuofc@gmail.com.
  • No later than midnight, January 15, 2013.
  • Authors should include title of the paper, name of the author(s) and affiliation in the body of the e-mail.

Important Dates and Information:

  • January 15, 2013: Deadline for abstract submission
  • February 1, 2013: Notification of acceptance
  • March 1, 2013: Submission of a long-form abstract (4-6 US letter-sized pages, including examples, figures, and references) from oral presenters.
  • April 17-18, 2013: Workshop on Sound Change Actuation
  • April 18-20, 2013: the 49th annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society