Call for Papers (english)

Tagung ?Was ist Grammatikalit?t?“
Conference “What is grammaticality?“

27.-29.6.2019

Eleonore Schmitt und Annika Vieregge, Otto-Friedrich-Universit?t Bamberg

You can download the Call for Papers as a PDF file(220.1 KB, 5 Seiten).

“What is grammaticality?”

The workshop provides a forum for recent studies on grammaticality and aims to reflect which methods are suitable to study grammaticality empirically. Grammaticality is defined broadly for the purposes of the workshop: We are both interested in the boundaries of language systems and in the question of how speakers perceive grammaticality.

The question of whether a form is grammatical or not, or how grammatical it is, is more complex than one might think at first glance. Grammaticality needs to be determined against the backdrop of one (or several) language system(s). Hence, grammaticality implicitly includes several questions: What is a language system? What is possible in a language system? How is a language system structured? These questions are also important for grammar writing, which has developed an increased focus on the status of variants (Hennig 2017). Hence, the question “What is grammaticality?” is closely related to the question “What is a language system?” Thus, the interaction between grammaticality and acceptability needs to be addressed (Hundt 2005; K?pcke 2011) as well as the question on which factors influence whether grammatical variants exist (Bybee 2005, 2011). Several studies already examined cases of variation (for instance Nowak 2015 on strong and weak verbs in German), but they are rarely linked to the question whether a certain form is a variant or an ungrammatical structure. In addition, the connection between grammaticality and optionality has to be taken into account as well as the status of optional structures as grammatical or lexical variants. Additionally, questions arise when grammaticality is connected with language acquisition and multilingualism: How can utterances of language learners be evaluated with regard to grammaticality? Is a structure ungrammatical if the structure is not part of a certain language system but of another system that a speaker knows as well? Here, the question arises whether grammaticality needs to be evaluated on an individual level.

The first area of interest of the conference deals with these questions from a cognitive and usage-based perspective. Additionally, the following questions can be addressed:

• How can grammaticality and language