CfP: DGfS-Workshop on Rightward Movement

[manfred.sailer at phil.uni-goettingen.de]

Apologies for multiple postings...


                          First Call for Papers

              RIGHTWARD MOVEMENT IN A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE


The workshop is part of the 29th Annual Meeting of the German Society
for Linguistics (DGfS) at the University of Bamberg, Germany
(27th-29th February, 2008)


Organizers:
Manfred Sailer (University of Goettingen)
Heike Walker (University of Goettingen)
Gert Webelhuth (University of Goettingen)


Goals and background:

Phenomena of Rightward Movement (e.g. Extraposition, Heavy-NP-Shift)
still raise a lot of questions and problems in linguistic theory. The
literature provides competing analyses in which the constituent that
appears in non-canonical position is (1) base-generated and
interpreted in situ, or it undergoes a movement process (2) in the
syntactic component or (3) on the level of PF (Göbbel 2007). These
theories make different predictions whether movement to the right is
subject to syntactic, semantic and pragmatic restrictions at all (see
the discussion in Buering and Hartmann 1997) and differ, partly
extremely, with respect to the mechanisms they provide for the
semantic interpretation of the dislocated constituent.  Another
controversial discussion concerns the cause of these movements: in
addition to purely syntactic triggers, prosodic and psycholinguistic
(e.g. Hawkins 1994) arguments are proposed (Gesetz der wachsenden
Glieder, preferences in production and parsing, etc.). The goal of the
workshop is to collect linguistic and psycholinguistic studies from
different languages in order to cast light on the following questions.

We invite contributions which address the following questions:

Can all phenomena of rightward movement be described as a uniform
cross-linguistic type of construction that is subject to universal
restrictions and which contrasts systematically with the type of
leftward movement?  Does each rightward movement process need a
trigger and what are possible triggers?  Why does rightward movement
often correlate with the complexity of the moved constituent and are
the criteria for complexity the same across languages?  In which
grammatical component does movement take place?  Can a prosodic or
psycholinguistic trigger induce movements in the syntactic component?
What is the status of the moved constituent with respect to the
semantic integration and the discourse?  Does word order in the
sentence influence the possibility and the characteristics of
rightward movement?


Selected references:

Büring, Daniel und Katharina Hartmann. 1997. "Doing the Right Thing."
The Linguistic Review 14, 1-42.

Göbbel, E. 2007. "Extraposition as PF Movement." WECOL 2006.

Hawkins, J. A. 1994. A Performance Theory of Order and
Constituency. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.


The time slot for the presentations will be 30 minutes, including
discussion time. Note that contributors can present only one paper at
the DGfS Annual Meeting as a whole. Conference languages are English
and German. Please submit an anonymous abstract of max. 1 page (500
words), as a Word- or pdf- file, and include the following information
in the body of the email: author's name(s), affiliation, email
address, title of the abstract. Send your submission to

hwalker at uni-goettingen.de

by August 15, 2007.

Notification of acceptance or rejection will be sent by email on
September 15, 2007.

Important dates:
deadline for submission: August 15, 2007
notification: September 15, 2007
preliminary program: December 15, 2007
DGfS conference: February 27-29, 2008

For further information please contact:

Manfred Sailer (manfred.sailer at phil.uni-goettingen.de)
Heike Walker (hwalker at uni-goettingen.de)
Gert Webelhuth (webelhuth at uni-goettingen.de)

and check the web site:

www.gwdg.de/~hwalker/events/dgfs.html





-- 
Manfred Sailer
Seminar fuer Englische Philologie
Kaete-Hamburger-Weg 3
37073 Goettingen, Germany
manfred.sailer at phil.uni-goettingen.de
http://www.gwdg.de/~msailer2