Full Title: DGfS Workshop 'rhythm beyond the word'
Short Title: DGfS-AG RBW

Date: 04-Mar-2009 - 06-Mar-2009
Location: Osnabrück, Germany
Contact Person: ruben van de vijver
Meeting Email: ruben@ling.uni-potsdam.de
Web Site: http://

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics

Call Deadline: 01-Sep-2008

Meeting Description:

The goal of the workshop Rhythm beyond the Word' is to bring together
researchers who focus on the role of rhythm in various subdomains of
linguistics. We invite contributions from scholars working in morphology,
phonology and syntax, psycho- and neurolinguistics, aphasiology and language
acquisition.

Call for Papers

Rhythm beyond the word

We are hosting a workshop entitled Rhythm beyond the word to be held from
March
4th till March 6th in Osnabrück, Germany, during th 31st annual meeting of
the
DGfS. Send us an abstract if you are interested in presenting a paper on any
of
the issues dscribed below. The electronic abstract should be one page text
plus
one pages for references and other material (for example, graphics) and in
pdf
format. Send it to ruben@ling.uni-potsdam.de and ralf.vogel@uni-bielefeld.de
by
September 1st 2008. We expect to be able to provide financial suport for
student
speakers.

Invited speakers:
- Volker Dellwo
- Dafydd Gibbon
- Carlos Gussenhoven
- Gerrrit Kentner
- Sonja Kotz
- Julia Schlüter
- Maren Schmidt-Kassow
- Petra Wagner

As a well-formedness condition on outputs, rhythm plays an important role in
language acquisition, psycholinguistics, language change, phraseology, and,
of
course, in morphology and phonology.
More recent research by a number of authors includes the following findings:

[1] established that rhythmic constraints affected the morpho-syntactic
development of Early Modern English and Early Modern German; rhythm has an
impact on word order in sentence production;
[2] showed that the rhythmic characteristics of a language are learned
extremely
early in language acquisition; rhythm helps children acquire knowledge of
the
word order regularities in their language; It has been shown that 5-days old
infants are able to discriminate their mother tongue from other languages
based
on its rhythmic characteristics.
[3] showed in experimental studies on healthy and patient populations in
neurolinguistics, ''syntactic'' effects observed at the basal ganglia have
been
reinterpreted as emerging from the basal ganglia's role as organizing a more
basic function of the basal ganglia: they are responsible for the rhythmic
sequencing of cognitive and motor activities.
Recent experimental work at the University of Potsdam revealed that rhythm
affects production. Speakers avoid rhythmically awkward sequences.

Such effects are unexpected in many current syntactic and psycholinguistic
theories in which phonology only interprets syntactic structure. The impact
of
rhythm on the various subdomains of linguistics, as illustrated by the
effects
mentioned above, is not integrated in linguistic theory yet. To achieve this
goal an exchange of data and ideas across the various linguistic subdomains
is
needed. This impact of rhythm on other dimensions of language is rather
unexpected from the perspective of theories in which phonology only
interprets
syntactic structure. Similar challenges arise for some psycholinguistic
models
of speech production where phonology is attributed the same role. Some
researchers have even pleaded for rhythmicality as the fundamental principle
of
Universal grammar in the Chomskyan sense.

The acquisition of rhythm below the word level is fairly well-studied, but
studies dealing with the acquisition of rhythm in compounds and phrases are
still rare. The same holds of many other areas: our knowledge of the role of
rhythm as a well-formedness condition is still incomplete.

Contributions should address one or more of the following questions - or any
other question pertinent to the theme of the workshop:
- What is the role of rhythm in phonology above the word level?
- How is rhythm above the word level acquired?
- What is the role of rhythm in syntax and morphology, both synchronically
and
diachronically?
- What is the role of rhythm in psycho- and neurolinguistics?
- Which role does rhythm play in aphasic speech?
- How does rhythm affect speech perception?
- How can linguistic rhythm be detected and defined?
- Is rhythm really as fundamental for language as recent findings suggest?

References
[1] Schlüter, J. (2005). Rhythmic Grammar. Berlin: Mouton, de Gruyter.
[2] Nazzi, T. & Ramus, F. (2003). Perception and acquisition of linguistic
rhythm by infants. Speech Communication 4: 233-243.
[3] Schmidt-Kassow, M. (2007). What's beat got to do with it? The influence
of
Meter on Syntactic Processing: ERP Evidence from Healthy and Patient
populations. Philosophical Dissertation. University of Potsdam.