Sandro Bachmann

As a general principle for all organized systems, situations of competition for a particular niche are expected to be resolved either by elimination or adaptation of one or more of the competing elements (Gause 1934). As organized systems where everything is connected, languages can be assumed to be no exception to this principle. And indeed it has been claimed that language change is partly driven or shaped by competition resolution or synonymy avoidance (see e.g. Carstairs-McCarthy 2010 on the evolution of morphology). Exploring the role of competition in language change in detail, Aronoff (2016) proposes to apply the notion of “niche” to linguistic systems to explain distributions of rival expressions in languages. A clear example of adaptation in language is the distribution of the affixes -ic and -ical in English, which appear to be completely synonymous, but occupy different morphological niches: While -ic is generally preferred, forms in -ical are only derived from a subset of stems ending in -ology (cf. Lindsay & Aronoff 2013).

Aronoff’s proposal interestingly suggests that competition and its resolution in language is an instantiation of a much more general principle, which opens up an interdisciplinary dialogue about competition resolution across complex systems. Moreover, it provides a framework that can bring together phenomena not normally considered together. Aronoff (2016), for instance, discusses allomorphy, ranging from resolved (complementary distributed) allomorphy to situations of (near-)equilibrium such as overabundance (cf. Thornton 2011), but he also addresses limits to defaults in inflection classes (cf. e.g. Carstairs-McCarthy 1994).

Conceivably, the niche metaphor can be extended to many more phenomena. For example, Walsh (2012) describes a phenomenon in the Australian language Murrinhpatha that might be termed templatic, or slot competition, where there is a particular slot on the verb that can be filled either by a direct object bound pronoun or by an indirect bound pronoun. Only when there is no direct object, or when the direct object has zero exponence can the indirect object appear in that slot.

In this workshop, we propose to explore the extent to which the notion of niche can be extended to linguistics (and therefore the extent to which an interdisciplinary dialogue becomes feasible and fruitful). In order to keep the range of phenomena within reasonable boundaries, we focus on morphological phenomena, and in particular on niches provided by the language system (thus excluding sociocultural niches such as register). Potential phenomena and topics linked to the notion of niche include (but are not limited to):

>>> Rivalry between derivational affixes
Bases may have several derivational operations available to them, which seem to be rivalling in the sense that they yield similar results. This situation may point to genuine rivalry or, on closer inspection, they may be occupying different niches, based on e.g. selection restrictions of the base or of the morphological markers, or on properties of the resulting derivate.

>>> Allomorphy in inflectional systems
It is a well-established fact that inflectional systems can be organized in classes, effectively creating a situation of lexeme-based allomorphy. Less is known about the elements that contribute to the rise, fall, and maintenance of these classes. Diachronic (corpus) research can shed light on these issues, and achieve a fuller picture of the niches constituted by inflection classes.

>>> Productive niches
Niches may also provide an environment for the survival of morphological patterns that are otherwise absent or lost in a language, such as partial agreement. These types of niches may be called productive niches, which can help understand the tenacity of lexically limited morphological (sub)systems.

>>> Slot competition
As has been discussed above, a different type of competition is slot competition. Apart from the type exemplified by Murrinhpatha, one can think for instance of so-called hierarchical alignment systems, where the competition between person markers for a particular templatic slot is resolved systematically, generally on the basis of a hierarchy of person value and/or syntactic role.

>>> Psycholinguistic factors in competition resolution
Beyond the purely linguistic definition of niches lies the question of the psychological reality of niches. A different set of questions therefore relate to psycholinguistic factors involved in the resolution of competition, e.g. frequency of use, the number of members in a particular morphological class, the degree of similarity between the items in a morphological class.

>>> Structural parsing competition
Morphologically complex words may show structural ambiguity in the sense that they can have more than one structural interpretation, which may be regarded as a form of parsing competition. One possible reason that these ambiguities persist may be because they are associated with different paths of semantic relations in the mental lexicon and therefore not in direct competition.

The topics described above can be approaches in many different ways. For the workshop we propose to focus on four broad approaches (but contributors should not feel limited by them):

>>> Explicit comparisons with ecological niches, addressing questions such as what would be the linguistic equivalent of environmental factors, what would a species mean in linguistics, to what extent do we see interaction between species and the enviromental factors that is typical of ecological niches (e.g. depletion of the resources by growth rates that are too fast)?
>>> In-depth analyses of phenomena, addressing the nature of niches and their explanatory value for the understanding of the phenomenon in question.
>>> Comparative (typological, areal, genealogical) perspectives on niches, adressing questions regarding the genealogical/areal (in)stability of niches, borrowability of niches, common versus uncommon niches.
>>> Corpus studies of niches. Competing exponents of a feature value (or a bundle of feature values) are ideally in complementary distribution. Corpus studies, however, may show that distributions are no more than statistical tendencies – or even very different than is claimed (see e.g. Lindsay & Aronoff 2013).



References

– Aronoff, Mark. 2016. Competition and the lexicon. In: A. Elia, C. Iacobini & M. Voghera (eds.): Livelli di Analisi e fenomeni di interfaccia. Atti del XLVII Congresso Internazionale della Società di Linguistica Italiana. Roma: Bulzoni Editore, pp. 39-52.
– Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew. 1994. Inflection classes, gender and the Principle of Contrast. In: Language 70, pp. 737–788.
– Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew. 2010. The evolution of morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
– Gause, Georgij F. 1934. The struggle for existence. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins.
– Lindsay, Mark & Mark Aronoff. 2013. Natural selection in self-organizing morphological systems. In: F. Montermini, G. Boyé, J. Tseng (eds.): Morphology in Toulouse: Selected Proceedings of Décembrettes 7. Munich: Lincom Europa, pp. 133–153.
– Thornton, Anna M. 2011. Overabundance (Multiple Forms Realizing the Same Cell): A Non-canonical Phenomenon in Italian Verb Morphology. In: M. Maiden, J. Smith, J. Charles, M. Goldbach & M. Hinzelin (eds.): Morphological Autonomy: Perspectives from Romance Inflectional Morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 358–381.
– Walsh, Michael James. 2012. The Muɹinyapata language of north-west Australia. Munich: LINCOM.

Der eintägige Workshop findet im Rahmen des SNF-Projekts " Kürzungen im Althoch-deutschen " statt, welches einer umfassenden Untersuchung des Phänomens der Kurz-schreibung in den althochdeutschen Quellen gewidmet ist (ahdk.uzh.ch).

In den althochdeutschen Kürzungen lässt sich die tiefe Verankerung der volkssprachigen Schriftlichkeit in der lateinischen nachzeichnen. Eine volkssprachige Eigenentwicklung kann zwar sporadisch beobachtet werden, ist aber nicht in jedem Fall gesichert. Fragen wirft vor allem die Rezeption der Kürzungen durch zeitgenössische Drittpersonen auf. Indem die althochdeutsche Schriftlichkeit in die lateinische eingebettet ist und sich gleich-zeitig mit der Schriftlichkeit benachbarter Volkssprachen berührt, sind ausserdem die la-teinischen und altniederdeutschen, altenglischen und altirischen Verhältnisse in die Be-trachtung der althochdeutschen einzuschliessen. Kürzungen sind auch ein wesentliches Merkmal der nichtstandardkonformen Verschriftung in den modernen Medien (SMS u.ä.). Es soll daher auch ausgelotet werden, inwiefern hier allgemeine Prinzipien am Werk sind, oder ob es sich um ganz unterschiedliche Phänomene handelt. Ziel des Workshops ist es deshalb, die Kürzungen des mittelalterlichen Lateins und der genannten Volksspra-chen einander gegenüberzustellen und – auch mit Blick auf die modernen Verfahren – gemeinsam sowohl generelle als auch spezielle Fragen zu erörtern.

Die interdisziplinäre Veranstaltung ist öffentlich und richtet sich an Interessierte aus sämtlichen mediävistischen und linguistischen Fächern bzw. generell an alle, die sich mit Fragen der Schriftgeschichte und Schriftentwicklung auseinandersetzen möchten.