From Maj-Britt.MosegaardHansen at manchester.ac.uk Thu Oct 1 12:51:43 2009 From: Maj-Britt.MosegaardHansen at manchester.ac.uk (Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen) Date: Thu, 1 Oct 2009 13:51:43 +0100 Subject: Lectureship in French Studies, University of Manchester Message-ID: Lectureship in French Studies (any research specialism) University of Manchester, United Kingdom Available: January 2010 Application deadline: October 20, 2009 For further particulars and application forms, see: http://www.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/jobs/academic/vacancy/index.htm?ref=165474 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Histling-l mailing list Histling-l at mailman.rice.edu https://mailman.rice.edu/mailman/listinfo/histling-l From ilja.serzants at uib.no Sun Oct 18 15:07:35 2009 From: ilja.serzants at uib.no (Ilja Serzants) Date: Sun, 18 Oct 2009 17:07:35 +0200 Subject: Call for Papers: Workshop ?Subject and transitivity in Indo-European and beyond: A diachronic typological perspective? Message-ID: * APOLOGIES FOR MULTIPLE POSTING! Dear colleagues, Please be so kind as to distrubute this call for papers among interested colleagues and potential participants. Thanks a lot! Yours sincerely, Leonid Kulikov Ilja Ser?ant Weare planning to organize the workshop. Workshop ?SUBJECT AND TRANSITIVITY IN INDO-EUROPEAN AND BEYOND: A DIACHRONIC TYPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE? at the 43rd annual Meeting of Societas Linguistica Europaea Vilnius, 2?5 September 2010 (http://www.flf.vu.lt/sle2010/first_call) Organizers: Leonid Kulikov (Leiden University) and Ilya Ser?ant (University of Bergen) Contact emails: L.Kulikov at hum.leidenuniv.nl , ilja.serzants at uib.no The workshop proposal (including a preliminary list of participants and the topics of their papers) should be submitted to the SLE organizers before November 15, 2009. Therefore we ask potential participants to send us the provisional titles of their presentations (with a draft abstract) no later than November 7. Abstracts should be submitted by the end of December. Workshop description SUBJECT AND TRANSITIVITY IN INDO-EUROPEAN AND BEYOND: A DIACHRONIC TYPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE         The recent decades are marked with a considerable progress in the study of grammatical relations (subject, object) and their relationships with transitivity (see, among others, Hopper & Thompson 1980; Kittilä 2002; Næss 2007). Impressive results are achieved both in the study of the notion of prototypical transitive and intransitive clauses, with canonical subject and object marking (see, in particular, Aikhenvald et al. 2001; Bhaskararao & Subbarao 2004), and in the research of intermediary, ?quasi-transitive? (?quasi-intransitive?) types, often correlating with non-canonical encoding of the core relations (non-nominative subjects etc.). Meticulous research of subject properties has discovered an amazing variety of criteria of subjecthood that can be used as a powerful tool for detecting (non-canonical) subjects and, virtually, to arrive at a more adequate definition of subject.           Indo-European languages are particularly notorious for their diversity of non-canonical subject marking, ranking from nominative (standard), to dative, genitive, accusative etc., as in Icelandic (1) (see, among others, Bar?dal 2001), Lithuanian (2a), Polish (Holvoet 1991), or Bengali (Onishi 2001): (1)        Icelandic         Mér                      likar                þessi         tilgáta         I:DAT        like:PRES:3SG         this          hypothesis         ?I like this hypothesis.? (2)        Lithuanian a.             Man          uo lietaus            su?alo                            rankos             I:DAT        because of rain  freeze:PAST:3SG         hand:NOM.PL         My hands became frozen because of rain.' While the synchronic study of subject and transitivity in Indo-European languages (and beyond) has furnished detailed descriptions of syntactic patterns, inventories of features and types and valuable cross-linguistic observations, little attention was paid to the diachronic aspects of the phenomena in question. We cannot yet explain why and how the non-canonical subject marking emerges and disappears, how does it correlate with changes in the system of transitivity types. Correlations between different transitivity types and the status of the syntactic arguments (in particular, their subject/object properties) can be illustrated with the Lithuanian example in (2b). In contrast with (2a), it instantiates a higher degree of control of the subject over the situation, and the canonical subject marking is in correlation with the whole construction becoming more transitive as compared to (2a) (Ser?ant, forthc.): (2)         Lithuanian b.        (Kol ?jau ? universitet?,)                                  su?alau                      rankas,             (While I was going to university)         freeze:PAST:1SG          hand:ACC.PL            (nes vis? keli? spaud?iau snieg? rankose.)            (because all the way I pressed snow in the hands)         ?While I was going to the university, I froze up my hands, because all the way I pressed snow in the hands.?         Thus, of particular interest are such constructions where we observe increase of transitivity correlating with the increase of subject (and object) properties of the core argument(s). This is the case with the North Russian ?possessive perfect? constructions, as in (3), which originates in possessive construction of the mihi-est type with the passive participle (cf. Kuteva & Heine 2004), and attests acquiring subject properties by the oblique ?possessor? noun (Timberlake 1976): (3)         U nego           korov-a           /         korov-u                podojen-o         at he:GEN          cow-NOM  /         cow-ACC           milk:PART.PERF.PASS-SG.N         ?He has milked the cow.?         Another issue relevant for a diachronic typological study of subject and transitivity is the evolution of alignment systems. The developments in the system of subject-marking and expansion of non-canonical subjects, typically accompanied by rearrangements of transitivity types, may open the way to dramatic changes in the type of alignment ? for instance, from nominative-accusative to ergative-absolutive (as in Indo-Iranian), or from ergative-absolutive to nominative-accusative (as it was, presumably, the case in Proto-Indo-European, according to some hypotheses; cf. Bauer 2001 and Bavant 2008, among others). The relationships between these syntactic phenomenon are not yet sufficiently studied. In particular, our knowledge of the subject and transitivity features of the Indo-European proto-language is still quite limited (see Barðdal & Eythórsson 2009).         Indo-European languages, with their well-documented history and long tradition of historical and comparative research, offer a particularly rich opportunity for a diachronic typological study of the above-listed issues (see Bar?dal 2001 on Icelandic). One of the first research projects concentrating on the diachronic aspects of these phenomena started in 2008 in Bergen, under the general guidance of J. Bar?dal (see http://ling.uib.no/IECASTP).         The idea of our workshop is to bring together scholars interested in comparative research on subject and transitivity in Indo-European and to open up new horizons in the study of these phenomena, paying special attention to its diachronic aspects. While the workshop concentrates mainly on evidence from Indo-European, papers on non-Indo-European languages which could be relevant for a diachronic typological study of the issues in question will also be welcome. The issues to be addressed include, among others: ?        theoretical and descriptive aspects of a study of subject and transitivity:         ?        criteria for subjecthood and subject properties in Indo-European         ?        features of transitivity and transitivity types in Indo-European; how to define transitivity in constructions with non-canonical subjects and/or objects? ?        mechanisms of the rise or disappearance of non-canonical subject-marking ?        evolution of transitivity and changes in the inventory of transitivity types in the history of Indo-European ?        relationships between subject marking and transitivity types: evolution of subject-marking with different semantic classes of verbs ?        the main evolutionary types (from the point of view of subject marking and transitivity types) attested for Indo-European ?        subject and changes in the type of alignment: the emergence of ergativity out of constructions with non-canonical subject ?        voice, valency-changing categories and subject marking: their relationships in a diachronic perspective Leonid Kulikov                Ilya Ser?ant Leiden University        University of Bergen REFERENCES Aikhenvald. A.Y. et al. (eds) 2001. Non-canonical marking of subjects and objects. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Barðdal, J. 2001. Case in Icelandic: A Synchronic, Diachronic and Comparative Approach. Lund: Dept. of Scandinavian Languages, Lund University. Barðdal, J. & Eythórsson, Th. 2009. The Origin of the Oblique Subject Construction: An Indo-European Comparison. In: V. Bubeník et al. (eds), Grammatical Change in Indo-European Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 179?193. Bauer, B. 2001. Archaic syntax in Indo-European: the spread of transitivity in Latin and French. Berlin: Mouton. Bavant, M. 2008. Proto-Indo-European ergativity... still to be discussed. Pozna? Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 44/4: 433-447. Bhaskararao, P. & Subbarao, K. V. (eds) 2004. Non-nominative Subjects. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Holvoet, A. 1991. Transitivity and clause structure in Polish: a study in case marking. Warszawa: Slawistyczny Os?rodek Wydawniczy. Holvoet, A. 2009: Difuziniai subjektai ir objektai. In: A. Holvoet & R. Mikulskas (eds), Gramatini? funkcij? prigimtis ir rai?ka. Vilnius: Vilniaus universitetas & Asociacija ?Academia Salensis?, 37-68. Hopper, P. & Thompson, S. 1980. Transitivity in Grammar and Discourse. Language 56/2: 251-299. Kittilä, S. 2002. Transitivity: toward a comprehensive typology. Åbo: Åbo Akademiska Tryckeri. Kuteva, T. & Heine, B. 2004. On the possessive perfect in North Russian. Word 55: 37-71. Næss, Å. 2007. Prototypical transitivity. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Onishi, M. 2001. Non-canonically marked A/S in Bengali. In: A.Y. Aikhenvald et al. (eds), Non-canonical marking of subjects and objects. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 113-147. Ser?ant, I. A. forthc. Lability across oblique subject predicates in Baltic. In: L. Kulikov & N. Lavidas (eds), Typology of labile verbs: Focus on diachrony. Timberlake, A. 1976. Subject properties in the North Russian Passive. In: Ch. N. Li (ed.), Subject and Topic. New York: Academic Press, 545-594. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Histling-l mailing list Histling-l at mailman.rice.edu https://mailman.rice.edu/mailman/listinfo/histling-l From johanna.barddal at uib.no Thu Oct 22 19:31:38 2009 From: johanna.barddal at uib.no (johanna.barddal at uib.no) Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:31:38 +0200 Subject: Workshop: Variation and Change in Argument Realization Message-ID: First call for papers: Workshop on "Variation and Change in Argument Realization" organized by Jóhanna Barðdal (University of Bergen) and Michela Cennamo (University of Naples Federico II) Location: Capri and Naples, 28-30 May 2010 Invited speakers - Balthasar Bickel (University of Leipzig) - Miriam Fried (Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague) - Adam Ledgeway (University of Cambridge) - Ranko Matasovic (University of Zagreb) - Nigel Vincent (University of Manchester) URL: http://ling.uib.no/IECASTP/Workshop6.htm Research on the nature of argument structure and the factors determining its encoding and representation has highlighted the complex interplay of semantic, syntactic and pragmatic factors that determine argument realization within and across languages (cf. Cennamo 2003, Levin and Rappaport Hovav 2005, Bentley 2006, Goldberg 2006, Barðdal 2006, 2008, Ramchand 2008, Van Valin 2009, among others). The consensus view emerging from a large body of synchronic research acknowledges the key roles played by event-based notions such as aspect (e.g., telicity, incremental theme) and control, and inherent features of argument fillers, such as animacy and definiteness, in determining the mapping from the lexical semantic to the morphosyntactic planes. The existence of non-event based aspects in the encoding of arguments has also prompted current investigation of the contribution of the idiosyncratic (the root) and structural facets (the event-structure templates) of the meaning of verbs to argument realization, and the principles governing their integration (Rappaport Hovav 2008). This workshop aims at exploring these issues from a diachronic and variational perspective (cf. Barðdal and Chelliah 2009, Cennamo 2009), bringing together different strands of research on event/argument structure, as reflected in the choice of invited speakers, and focusing on: a) the applicability of current models, whether typological, projectionist, constructional, neo-constructional, co-compositional, and others, on actual diachronic changes and variational data from different domains, such as auxiliary selection, argument marking and linking, ditransitives, the conative, locative, (anti)causative alternation, etc. b) the predictions they make as to the progression and actualization of change, for instance whether syntactic aspects are affected earlier by change than lexical aspects, the role played by pragmatic notions, frequency, etc. c) the generalizations offered for recurrent patterns of variation and change, and the uniformity encountered. Contributions are invited from scholars of different theoretical persuasions for discussion on the general and specific implications of different theoretical models on argument/event structure in a diachronic and/or variational perspective, including, but not limited to, the following: - voice - case-marking and grammatical relations - (in)transitive alternations - split intransitivity - existential/presentative constructions Please send your abstracts of 500 words or less to the workshop's contact person: Eystein Dahl (Eystein.Dahl at uib.no). Abstracts should be sent no later than 15 December 2009, preferably in pdf-format. A response on abstracts will be sent out no later than 20 January 2010. References Barðdal, J. 2006. Construction-specific properties of syntactic subjects in Icelandic and German. Cognitive Linguistics 17 (1): 39-106. Barðdal, J. 2008. Productivity: Evidence from Case and Argument Structure in Icelandic. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Barðdal, J. and S. L. Chelliah (eds.). 2009. The Role of Semantic, Pragmatic, and Discourse Factors in the Development of Case. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bentley, D. 2006. Split intransitivity in Italian. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Cennamo, M. 2003. (In)transitivity and object marking: some current issues. In G. Fiorentino (ed.), Romance Objects, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 49-104. Cennamo, M. 2009. Argument structure and alignment variations and changes in Late Latin. In Barðdal, J. and S. L. Chelliah (eds.), 307-346. Goldberg, A. E. 2006. Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levin, B. and M. Rappaport Hovav. 2005. Argument Realization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ramchand, G. C. 2008. Verb Meaning and the Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rappaport Hovav, M. 2008. Lexicalized meaning and the internal temporal structure of events. In Rothstein (ed.), Crosslinguistic and Theoretical Approaches to the Semantics of Aspect. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 13-42. Van Valin, R. D. 2009. Lexical representation, co-composition, and linking syntax and semantics. J. Pustejovsky & P. Bullion (eds.), New Developments in the Generative Lexicon. Dordrecht: Kluwer. To appear. -- =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ Jóhanna Barðdal Research Associate Professor Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies University of Bergen P.O. box 7805 NO-5020 Bergen Norway johanna.barddal at uib.no Phone +47-55582438 (work) Phone +47-55201117 (home) Fax +47-55589660 (work) http://ling.uib.no/barddal _______________________________________________ Histling-l mailing list Histling-l at mailman.rice.edu https://mailman.rice.edu/mailman/listinfo/histling-l From silvia.luraghi at unipv.it Fri Oct 23 19:31:52 2009 From: silvia.luraghi at unipv.it (Silvia Luraghi) Date: Fri, 23 Oct 2009 21:31:52 +0200 Subject: Workshop on partitives Message-ID: Partitives Silvia Luraghi, Università di Pavia Tuomas Huumo, University of Tartu We plan to submit a workshop proposal to the 2010 Annual SLE (Societas Lingustica Europaea) Meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania (2 - 5 September, 2010), and invite papers on partitives in crosslinguistic perspective. Please send draft abstracts to both of us no later than November 8, 2009 (final abstracts must be submitted by January 1, 2010) at the following addresses: silvia.luraghi at unipv.it tuomas.huumo at utu.fi Workshop description Some languages, notably Baltic Finnic and Basque, have a partitive case, which is usually said to indicate partial affectedness of patients (cf. Blake 2001: 151). Such function is also attributed to other cases in languages that do not have a separate partitive, as in the case of the Hungarian partitive/ablative, and the partitive/genitive of various Indo-European languages (a separate partitive, lexically restricted, also exists in Russian). Depending on the language, the use of partitives may be more or less restricted. In Basque, for example, the partitive occurs in negative sentences and it can indicate either the object of transitive verbs or the subject on intransitive verbs (in other words, it can substitute the absolutive case in negative sentences). A connection between negation and partitive(genitive) also occurs in the Slavic and the Baltic Finnic languages. The alternation between the partitive and other cases sometimes also has connections with aspect: this has been argued for Baltic Finnic, Slavic (see e.g. Fischer 2004), and possibly Sanskrit (Dahl 2009). In fact, partitivity is not only a possible feature of patients: in Finnish existentials, for examples, even agentive intransitive verbs such as juosta ‘run’, opiskella ‘study’, etc., take partitive subjects. In some Indo-European languages, besides partitive objects and partitive subjects (mostly with unaccusative verbs, cf. Conti 2009 on Ancient Greek), partitive adverbials also exist, for example in time expressions (such as Nachts ‘during the night’ in German). In Ancient Greek, some locative occurrences of the partitive genitive are attested (see Luraghi 2003, 2009): è# halòs è# epì gês or sea:gen or on land:gen “either at sea or on land” (Homer, Od. 12.26-27). In one of the few existing cross-lingustic description of partitives, Moravcsik (1978: 272) summarizes typical semantic correlates of partitives as follows: a. the definitness-indefinitness of the noun phrase; b. the extent to which the object is involeved in the event; c. the completedness versus non-completedness of the event; d. whether the sentence is affirmative or negative. Moravcsik further remarks that marking difference brought about by the partitive “does not correlate with any difference in semantic case function”. Thus, the use of the partitive seems to be at odds with the basic function of cases, that is “marking dependent nouns for the type of relationship they bear to their heads” (Blake 2001: 1): rather than to indicate a specific grammatical or semantic relation that a NP bears to the verb, the partitive seems to indicate indeterminacy (in various manners). In fact, this has been noted by several authors. For example, Laka (1993: 158) suggestes that “what is referred to as ‘partitive case’ in Basque is a polar determiner, much like English any”. In Finnish, the functions of the partitive are also related to indeterminacy, unboundedness and polarity, and it is noteworthy that the partitive is not the sole marker of any grammatical function but participates in a complementary distribution with other cases in all its main functions, i.e. as marker of the object (PART~ACC), the existential subject (PART~NOM) and the predicate nominal (PART~NOM). In this connection, one must mention the so-called partitive article of some Romance varieties, which derives from the preposition which has substituted the Latin genitive (Latin de). In French, the partitive article is clearly a determiner and not a case marker, as shown by its distribution: L’enfant joue dans le jardin / un enfant joue dans le jardin the child plays in the garden / a child plays in the garden Les enfants jouent dans le jardin / des enfants jouent dans le jardin the childred play in the garden / some(=part. art.) childred play in the garden The brief survey above shows that there are striking similarities among partitives across languages, which are not limited to the indication of partial affectedness. However, reaserch on partitives is mostly limited to individual languages. In this workshop we would like to bring together and compare data from different languages in which a case (or an adposition, as in French) are classified as partitive. Possible topics for the workshop include, but are not limited to, the following: (a) The distribution of partitives in different syntactic positions (objects, subjects, other roles) and across constructions; (b) Partitives as determiners; (c) Types of verbs with which partitive subjects (or objects) can occur; (d) The diachrony of partitives: what are the sources of partitive markers? What is the diachronic relation between ablative, genitive, and partitive? (cf. Heine and Kuteva 2002: 32-33, 241); (e) Do partitives always start out as possible substitutes for the object case and then extend to subjects and possibly to other roles? (data from French and other early Romance varieties would be in order regarding this point); (f) Partitives as non-canonical grammatical markers: Finnish partitive subjects and objects have been treated under the heading of ‘non-canonical marking’ (Sands and Campbell 2001). However, it is highly questionable that the occurrence of partitive subjects and objects marked by a partitive article, as in French, should also be considered under this heading. Is the change from case marker (including adpositions) some kind of grammaticalization process and at what stage should a morpheme start to be considered a determiner, rather than a case marker? (g) Discourse functions of partitives: Since partitives indicate indeterminacy, it might be expected that they are not topical elements in discourse. For instance, Helasvuo (2001) has shown that the referents of Finnish partitive subjects (unlike those of nominative subjects) are typically not tracked in discourse. What is the discourse function of partitives crosslinguistically? (h) Semantic roles and referential functions of partitives. (i) Partitives, aspect and quantification: The Baltic Finnic partitive object is well-known for its function of indicating aspectual unboundedness. Other BF partitives (existential, copulative) do not share the aspectual function proper but often indicate an incremental theme (in the sense of Dowty 1991), which gives rise to unbounded “nominal aspect” (Huumo 2003, 2009). What are the aspectual and quantificational functions of partitives crosslinguistically? References Blake, Barry 2001. Case. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Conti, Luz 2008. Zum Genitiv bei impersonalen Konstruktionen im Altgriechischen. Paper read at the XIII. Fachtagung der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft, Salzburg 22.9.-27.9.2008. Dahl, Eystein 2009 Some semantic and pragmatic aspects of object alternation in Early Vedic. In J. Barðdal and S. Chelliah (eds) The Role of Semantics and Pragmatics in the Development of Case. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Dowty, David 1991. Thematic proto-roles and argument selection. Language 67, 547–619. Fischer, Susann 2004. Partitive vs. Genitive in Russian and Polish: an empirical study on case alternation in the object domain. In S. Fischer, R. van de Vijver and R. Vogel (eds.), Experimental Studies in Linguistics. I, LiP 21. 123-137. Heine, Bernd and Tania Kuteva 2002. World Lexicon of Grammaticalization. Cambridge: CUP. Helasvuo, Marja-Liisa 2001. Syntax in the Making: The emergence of syntactic units in Finnish conversation. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Huumo, Tuomas 2003. Incremental Existence: The World According to the Finnish Existential Sentence. Linguistics 41/3: 461–493 Huumo, Tuomas 2009. Fictive dynamicity, nominal aspect, and the Finnish copulative construction. Cognitive Linguistics 20/1: 43–70. Laka, Itziar 1993. Unergatives that Assign Ergative, Unaccusatives that Assign Accusative. MITWPL 18: 149-172. Luraghi, Silvia 2003. On the Meaning of Prepositions and Cases. A Study of the Expression of Semantic Roles in Ancient Greek. Amsterdan: Benjamins. Luraghi, Silvia 2009. The internal structure of adpositional phrases. In J. Helmbrecht Y. Nishina, Y.M. Shin, S. Skopeteas, E. Verhoeven, eds., Form and Function in Language Research: Papers in honour of Christian Lehmann. Berlin/ New York, Mouton de Gruyter, 231-254. Moravcsik, Edith 1978. On the case marking of objects. In Joseph Greenberg et al. (eds.) Universals of Human Language, vol IV. Syntax. Stanford University Press, 249-290. Sands, Kristina and Lyle Campbell 2001. Non-canonical subjects and objects in Finnish. In A. Aikenvald, R. M. W. Dixon, and M. Onishi (eds.) Non-canonical Marking of Subjects and Objects. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 251-305. Silvia Luraghi Dipartimento di Linguistica Teorica e Applicata Università di Pavia Strada Nuova 65 I-27100 Pavia telef.: +39-0382-984685 fax: +39-0382-984487 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- _______________________________________________ Histling-l mailing list Histling-l at mailman.rice.edu https://mailman.rice.edu/mailman/listinfo/histling-l