Rara & Rarissima — Collecting and interpreting unusual characteristics of human languages Leipzig (Germany), 29 March - 1 April 2006

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Invited speakers

Larry Hyman  (University of California, Berkeley)
Frans Plank  (Universität Konstanz)
Ian Maddieson (University of California, Berkeley)
Daniel L.  Everett (University of Manchester)

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Objective

Universals of language have been studied extensively for the last four decades, allowing fundamental insight into the principles and general properties of human language. Only incidentally have researchers looked at the other end of the scale. And even when they did, they mostly just noted peculiar facts as "quirks" or "unusual behavior", without making too much of an effort at explaining them beyond calling them "exceptions" to various rules or generalizations.

Rarissima and rara, features and properties found only in one or very few languages, tell us as much about the capacities and limits of human language(s) as do universals. Explaining the existence of such rare phenomena on the one hand, and the fact of their rareness or uniqueness on the other, should prove a reasonable and interesting challenge to any theory of how human language works.

Themes

A suggested (but not exhaustive) list of relevant themes is:

• examples of rara from various languages
• examples of rara from all subfields of linguistics
  
• distribution and areal patterning
• the meaning of rara for linguistic theory
• the importance of rara for historical linguistics
• the concept of rara and its role in the history of linguistics
• methods for establishing and finding rara

Local Organizers

Jan Wohlgemuth
Michael Cysouw
Orin Gensler
David Gil

Contact

Rara & Rarissima Conference attn. Jan Wohlgemuth Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Department of Linguistics Deutscher Platz 6 04103 Leipzig Germany rara2006eva.mpg.de Fax +49-341-3550-333

* Download the Rara 2006 poster in A1 format (PDF, ca. 80 KB) and in A4 format (PDF, ca. 67 KB) *