The Bantu-Romance Connection workshop

[Cecile De Cat]

Second call for papers 

*** Attendance to this workshop is limited to 30 participants (as
required by the European Science Foundation). If you are keen to attend,
please submit an abstract! *** 

Meeting Description: 

The Bantu-Romance Connection project aims to bring together specialists
of Bantu and Romance languages to explore striking morpho-syntactic
similarities between these two unrelated language families, in an effort
to better understand the nature of linguistic structure, its diversity
and constraints. 

Bantu and Romance languages display a number of morpho-syntactic
similarities, including null subjects, object clitics, rich gender/class
agreement systems, and extraposition of arguments resulting in a variety
of surface word orders. Yet most scholars of Romance have little
awareness of Bantu linguistic structures, and many Bantuists are not
fully aware of the syntactic diversity of Romance languages. We would
like to begin remeding this situation by proposing a 2-day workshop
dedicated in equal parts to each language group. The format of the
workshop will encourage debate as well as informal discussion between
scholars. 

A number of questions arise regarding the surface similarities found in
these two language groups: Are the syntactic structures underlying these
surface similarities really the same? or are they actually different,
and how can we tell? What is the diversity of structures permitted in
each of these domains, and how are they represented across these two
language groups? 

To address these questions, presentations and posters will be centred
around three themes: 

- The structure of the Determiner Phrase 
- Clitics, agreement and object drop 
- Focus, topic and Information Structure 

Invited speakers: 

Anna Cardinaletti (Università di of Venezia, Italy) 
Vicki Carstens (University of Mississippi, USA) 
Joao Costa (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal) 
Mara Frascarelli (Università di Roma Tre, Italy) 
Giuliana Giusti (Università di Venezia, Italy) 
Nancy Kula (University of Leiden, The Netherlands) 
Marie Labelle (Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada) 
Lutz Marten (SOAS, UK) 
Yukiko Morimoto (Zentrum für allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Germany) 
Nhlanhla Thwala (School for Oriental and African Studies, UK) 
Marianna Visser (Stellenbosch University, South Africa) 
Roberto Zamparelli (Università di Bergamo, Italy) 

Submissions are invited for 12 posters (4 per theme, including 2 per
language family). Preference will be given to those that demonstrate an
interest in exploring these issues cross-linguistically. Contributions
addressing acquisition issues are welcome. 

Submission format: maximum 2 pages of A4, font size 12pt. Please email
an anonymous version to c.decat at leeds.ac.uk, including your name,
affiliation and contact details in the body of the message. 

Deadline for submission: 10 February 2006 

Acceptance will be announced by 20 February 2006