24.5356, Calls: Syntax, Linguistic Theories/Poland

Fri Dec 20 15:09:43 UTC 2013

LINGUIST List: Vol-24-5356. Fri Dec 20 2013. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 24.5356, Calls: Syntax, Linguistic Theories/Poland

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Date: Fri, 20 Dec 2013 10:08:25
From: Piotr Cegłowski [cpiotr at wa.amu.edu.pl]
Subject: Information Structure Meets Generative Syntax

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Full Title: Information Structure Meets Generative Syntax 

Date: 11-Sep-2014 - 14-Sep-2014
Location: Poznań, Poland 
Contact Person: Piotr Cegłowski
Meeting Email: cpiotr at wa.amu.edu.pl
Web Site: http://sle2014.eu/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Linguistic Theories; Syntax 

Call Deadline: 15-Jan-2014 

Meeting Description:

For the last thirty years or so, the categories of Information Structure such as focus and topic have been incorporated into the mainstream of generative syntactic research. Starting with a classical partition of sentence structure into focus and presupposition (Chomsky 1972,  Jackendoff 1972), generative linguists have thought of the ways in which pragmatically-oriented categories of information structure could be coded in formal syntax (apart from their discourse-related provenance, the phenomena in question belong to distinct grammatical domains, and therefore, have naturally been studied at different grammatical interfaces: syntax-semantics, syntax-phonology and semantics-phonology).

Thus, one of the research goals in the GB era was to define the formal exponents of the displacement processes, e.g., Topicalization and Clitic Left Dislocation (Cinque 1983, 1990; Lasnik and Saito 1992) and a feature checking - based  approach  to Focus (Horvath 1986; Brody 1990). With the advent of Minimalism, new ways of reasoning emerged, e.g.,  the cartographic approach to focus and topic (Rizzi 1997, following Pollock 1989, Belletti 2004; Rizzi 2006) or the partitioning of focus into information and identification foci (Kiss 1998, 2002, Zubizarreta 1998, Reinhart 2006), to name but two. The era of Late Minimalism has witnessed further proliferation of ideas including some interesting alternatives to cartography-based solutions, e.g., Bouchard (2009); Neeleman et al (2009) (see Craenenbroeck (ed.) 2009), as well as other inspiring proposals (López 2009; Fanselow and Lenertová 2011, among others).

That the question of the relation between narrow syntax and information structure remains a theme of a lively debate and ranks high on the generative (both minimalist and non-minimalist) agenda has best been proven by the quality and quantity of recent contributions in the field. 

The aim of the workshop is to review the question of the relation between narrow syntax and information structure by discussing new data and proposals, including the ones which seem constructively critical of the mainstream approaches. For references, see Call for Papers.

2nd Call for Papers:

We would like to organize a workshop on Information Structure in Generative Syntax at Societas Linguistica Europaea, which will take place September 11-14, 2014 at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland (http://www.sle2014.eu/).

Our aim is to bring together linguists interested in such research questions (among others) as: 

(i) What’s the empirical, cross-linguistic coverage for focus and topic?
(ii) Are there features [Foc] or [Top] in the derivation?
(iii) Is focus fronting movement for focus, or for contrast ?
(iv) Is there covert focus fronting?
(v) Is there just one focus position in sentence structure?
(vi) Is there left periphery of nominal projections?
(vii) Is there evidence for Information Structure - sensitive extraction from nominal projections?
(viii) Are focus and topic quantificational?
(ix) How are topic and focus related to predication?
(x) Are topic and focus movements sensitive to islands?
(xi) What’s the prosody of focus and topic? 

Important Information:

1. For all abstracts the deadline for submission is January 15, 2014. Authors are requested to register and upload their abstract individually via the Submit Abstract form: http://wwwling.arts.kuleuven.be/conference/admin/SubmitAbstractSLE. 

2. Abstracts should i) be anonymous, ii) contain between 400 and 500 words (exclusive of references), and (iii) state research questions, approach, method, data and (expected) results.

3. Abstracts shall be subjected to a blind peer review and receive 3 scores each. Notification of acceptance: March 31, 2014.

4. Participants are allowed to present only one single-authored paper at SLE 2014. In addition, they may either have a joint paper (but not as a first author) or be a discussant in a workshop. Two co-authored papers are also allowed. The workshop introduction does not count as an authored paper.

5. Workshop slots last 30 minutes. Slots may be combined to have a session of an hour (keynote speakers).

For more information, contract workshop convenors:

Przemysław Tajsner: tprzemek at wa.amu.edu.pl
Agata Wiśniewska: awisniewska at wa.amu.edu.pl
Piotr Cegłowski: cpiotr at wa.amu.edu.pl
Jadwiga Bogucka: jbogucka at wa.amu.edu.pl

For general information (e.g., registration, social events, etc.) visit the SLE website: http://www.sle2014.eu/.

Selected References: 

Bouchard, Denis. 2009. A solution to the problem of cartography. In Craenenbroeck, van J. (ed.) 2009.
Belletti, Adriana. (ed.) 2004. Structures and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
Cinque, Gulgielmo. 1990. Types of A'-Dependencies. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
van Craenenbroeck , Jeroen. (ed.). 2009. Alternatives to cartography. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter.
Fanselow, Gisbert and Lenertová, Denisa. 2011. Left peripheral focus: mismatches between syntax and information structure. Natural Languages and Linguistic Theory 29: 169-209.
Kiss, È. Katalin. 2002. The Syntactic Structure of Hungarian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
López, Louis. 2009. A Derivational Syntax of Information Structure. Oxford: OUP
Neeleman, Ad, Elena Titov, Hans van de Koot and Reiko Vermeulen. 2009. A syntactic typology of topic, focus and contrast. In Van Craenenbroeck, J. (ed.)
Reinhart, Tanya. 2006. Interface Strategies. Cambridge, MA:MIT Press.
Rizzi, Luigi. 2006. On the form of chains: criterial positions and ECP effects. In Cheng , L.L-S and Corver, N. (eds.) 2006.

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