ICAME 33 :: Pre-conference workshops

Five workshops will be organized on Wednesday 30 May; papers were invited for the first three of these, with submissions to be sent to the workshop organizers by the deadline of 30 January 2012. Detailed calls for papers or workshop descriptions can be downloaded as PDF files for individual workshops below; a single file containing all descriptions is also available.

Abstracts for all talks (including those of the main conference) are included in the provisional book of abstracts which is available for download (file size c. 2 MB; current version: 2 May 2012). Detailed timetables are equally available for download.

WS1: "Comparing spoken and written interlanguage" convened by Gaëtanelle Gilquin (FNRS & University of Louvain)

Summary: The recent advent of a number of spoken learner corpora to complement earlier, written-only learner corpora has opened the way for a comparison between spoken and written interlanguage. This workshop aims at bringing together researchers who use corpora to compare spoken and written data produced by non-native speakers of English. The comparison can focus on any type of phenomenon, ranging from lexis and phraseology to syntax, through discourse or pragmatics. Studies that investigate the presence of spoken features in written interlanguage or written features in spoken interlanguage are also welcome, as are papers that deal with methodological issues involved in the comparison of spoken and written interlanguage.

Full text of the call for papers: download in PDF format

Papers in this workshop:

Full papers (20 + 10 minutes):

1. Callies, Marcus (University of Bremen). Emphatic do in advanced learner English - A contrastive interlanguage analysis of spoken and written corpora
2. de Haan, Pieter and Monique van der Haagen (Radboud University Nijmegen). Comparing very advanced spoken and written Dutch EFL: Methodological matters in dealing with longitudinal data
3. Deshors, Sandra C (New Mexico State University). Contrasting the linguistic structure of L2 spoken and written registers: A multifactorial perspective
4. Grigaliūnienė, Jonė and Rita Juknevičienė (Vilnius University). Participle clauses in spoken and written learner language: The case of Lithuanian-speaking learners

Work-in-progress resports (10 + 5 minutes)

1. Gilquin, Gaëtanelle (University of Louvain). The ups and downs of phrasal verbs in spoken and written Learner Englishes
2. Molino, Alessandra and Luisa Bozzo (University of Turin). A corpus-based study of Italian advanced learners’ use of phrasal verbs in spoken, written and computer-mediated communication
3. Pavesi, Caterina (Catholic University of the Sacred Heart). Learner English sequences from a corpus of asynchronous chats: More spoken or more written?
4. Vine, Elaine W (Victoria University of Wellington). A comparison of high frequency category ambiguous words in spoken and written learner English

WS2: "Corpus-based contrastive analysis" convened by Karin Aijmer (Gothenburg University) and Bengt Altenberg (Lund University)

Summary: In the last decades, significant progress has been made in all the main areas central to the field of corpus-based contrastive analysis:

• Development of multilingual comparable and/or translation corpora
• Development of software for handling, analyzing and searching multilingual corpora
• Comparison of a range of languages at all levels of description, from lexis to discourse
• Using the contrastive data to enrich the description and theory of the compared languages
• Practical applications in areas such as language teaching, lexicography and computer-aided translation

We invite full papers and work-in-progress reports touching on all these areas, but with special focus on any of the last three. The workshop will conclude with a panel discussion reviewing software useful for multilingual corpus analysis.

Full text of the call for papers: download in PDF format

Papers in this workshop:

1. Aijmer, Karin (University of Gothenburg) and Bengt Altenberg (University of Lund). The Swedish adverb gärna and its English correspondences.
2. Amoia, Marilisa, Kerstin Kunz, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski and Erich Steiner (Saarland University). Designing a Multilingual Corpus for the Contrastive Analysis of English and German
3. Ebeling, Jarle and Signe Oksefjell Ebeling (University of Oslo). Why did she build herself a house when she could simply have built a house? A contrastive analysis of the patterns V REFL NPindef  and V NPindef in English vs. Norwegian
4. Egan, Thomas (Hedmark University College) and Gudrun Rawoens (Ghent University). ‘Overness’ in English and French
5. Freake, Rachelle (University of London). Two dimensions of cross-linguistic semantic prosody: translation equivalents, borrowing, and nationalism in Canada
6. Goossens, Diane (University of Louvain). Quantity approximation in Dutch, English and French business news reporting: a corpus-driven, contrastive investigation of expressions of quantity approximation
7. Lavid, Julia (Universidad Complutense de Madrid). Towards a richly-annotated and register-controlled bilingual (English-Spanish) textual database for contrastive linguistic and translation research
8. Malá, Markéta (Charles University in Prague). Translation counterparts of the become-type of copular verbs as markers of ‘resulting’ meaning in a parallel English-Czech corpus.
9. Nordrum, Lene (Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg). The ergative perspective in contrast: the rhetorical function of the ergative perspective in English, Norwegian and Swedish research articles in medicine
10. Rabadán, Rosa (University of León), Marlén Izquierdo (University of León) and Isabel Pizarro (University of Valladolid). Contrastive rhetoric for FL writing: An English-Spanish case study
11. Stenström, Anna-Brita (Bergen University). What is ¿Qué tal? in English: Spanish and English youth language compared
12. Viberg, Åke (Uppsala University). Contrastive studies and typology: The case of postural verbs

WS3: "Disappearances and failures in language change" convened by Hendrik De Smet and Peter Petré (FWO & University of Leuven)

Summary: Historical linguistics in the past few decades has for the most part focused on success stories. The booming subfield of grammaticalization research testifies to this, with its special interest in constructions that become ever more frequent and ever more entrenched. The natural next step is to address the question of how constructions sometimes fail to develop as expected, or even simply disappear. While there have been various case studies devoted to failures and disappearances, a systematic account has been lacking. Such an account will need to look at many factors that may be potentially involved (including at least competition and system-dependency) as well as their relative weight.

Full text of the call for papers: download in PDF format

Papers in this workshop:

1. Diemer, Stefan (Technical University Berlin). Whatever happened to the English prefix, and could it stage a comeback? A corpus-based investigation
2. Dolberg, Florian (Universität Hamburg). English Gender: Change and Loss
3. Fraikin, Mathieu (University of Liège) and Peter Petré (University of Leuven). When something happened to 'happen': A diachronic study of episode boundary markers in Old and Middle English narratives
4. Hundt, Marianne (University of Zurich). The demise of being to V
5. Rosemeyer, Malte (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg). A Usage-based Account of Linguistic Disappearances: The Life Span of Spanish and English BE + PP

WS4: "Systems of pragmatic annotation in the spoken component of ICE-Ireland" organized by John M. Kirk (The Queen's University Belfast) and Jeff L. Kallen (Trinity College Dublin)

Summary: SPICE-Ireland is an annotated version of the spoken component of ICE-Ireland, one of the national components comprising the International Corpus of English (cf. Greenbaum 1996). SPICE stands for ‘Systems of Pragmatic Annotation in the Spoken Component of ICE-Ireland’. Workshop participants be introduced to the annotation sets used in the corpus and to some initial corpus findings, and will be able to use the corpus with the help of some specifically-designed tasks and topics. They will receive a CD-ROM with SPICE-Ireland version 1.2.2, as well as a copy of the User's Guide.

Full description and provisional timetable of the workshop: download in PDF format

WS5: "TalkBank corpora and tools: A tutorial" organized by Brian MacWhinney (Carnegie Mellon University)

Summary: This tutorial will survey TalkBank public open-access corpora and the computational tools that have been developed for their analysis. These are the largest available corpora for spoken language data. CHILDES, which is the largest single component of TalkBank, contains 60 million words of child-adult conversation across 26 languages; the adult segment of TalkBank includes 63 million words of adult-adult conversation with the bulk in English. All of the data are in a format specified by a detailed XML schema. As such, this is the largest consistently transcribed database of spoken language materials. Nearly all of the transcripts in TalkBank are linked on the utterance level to either audio or video. For CHILDES, about 25% is linked to media.

Full description of the workshop (listing the various issues reviewed): download in PDF format