Grammatical Relations in Spoken Language Corpora

In this workshop we focus on the interrelation of grammatical relations as reflected in the structure of individual languages and their communicative underpinnings in discourse production, and we seek to bring together scholars with a primary focus on corpus-based work. We intend to broaden the perspective on the usage-oriented rationale behind specific structural aspects of grammatical relation systems. We hence seek corpus-based research that includes not only classic discourse-functional factors like topic marking and topic continuity (Givón 1976, 1979, 1983; Shibatani 1991) or the converse function of reference establishment (DuBois 1987; cf. Evans & Levinson 2009:445), but also structural (e.g. the interplay of person agreement and pronoun use, cf. Rosenkvist 2009; Nichols 2018; Schnell & Barth 2020), cultural, and social factors (e.g. use of ergative constructions in relation to the social role of speakers in Samoan, cf. Duranti 1992). We furthermore restrict the purview of this workshop to spoken-language discourse as we see spoken language usage not only as the primary seedbed for the emergence of grammatical relations generally speaking (by way of its primordial form of usage of human languages) and specifically as containing those interactions between prosodic, syntactic and morphological structure that lie behind processes of univerbation (Lehmann 1982) and morphologization (Bybee 1985).