26.4577, Calls: Historical Linguistics, Syntax/Netherlands

Thu Oct 15 22:50:20 UTC 2015

LINGUIST List: Vol-26-4577. Thu Oct 15 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.4577, Calls: Historical Linguistics, Syntax/Netherlands

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Date: Thu, 15 Oct 2015 18:50:11
From: Heidi Klockmann [h.e.klockmann at uu.nl]
Subject: Linguistic Variation in the Interaction between Internal and External Syntax

Full Title: Linguistic Variation in the Interaction between Internal and External Syntax 

Date: 08-Feb-2016 - 09-Feb-2016
Location: Utrecht, Netherlands 
Contact Person: Heidi Klockmann
Meeting Email: h.e.klockmann at uu.nl
Web Site: http://www.linguisticvariation.com/events/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Syntax 

Call Deadline: 23-Nov-2015 

Meeting Description:

The aim of this workshop is to look at linguistic variation from the perspective of the interaction between the internal and external syntax of XPs. In particular, how are syntactic mechanisms (e.g. case assignment, agree, EPP movement, etc.) and the distribution of linguistic items in the syntactic tree influenced by the internal structure of such lexical/grammatical items? And, what type of variation do we find in this domain?

A lot of linguistic research in the past years has focused on the internal structure of functional and lexical items. Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993) started a movement in which it was assumed that syntax does not operate on opaque lexical items, but rather on feature bundles. Since then, research has been focused on questions concerning the exact featural make-up of a functional or lexical item, for instance in the work by Borer (2005). This attention to the internal structure of items also plays an important role in the Nano-Syntactic framework (Starke 2011), where a driving goal is to identify the pieces of structure involved in syncretisms within languages and variation in these syncretisms between languages. What we would like to explore in this workshop is how these very precise assumptions about the internal syntax of functional and lexical items affects the syntax of the external environment, including the distribution of such items. So, for instance, one can as
 k how the internal make-up of pronouns, numerals or compounds interacts with case and agreement, or how the internal structure of verbs interacts with their positioning in the syntactic tree. To what degree is the distribution or syntactic behavior of some element derivable from its internal syntax?

We want to combine this approach with a variation perspective, since the featural make-up of elements has also played an important role in the variation debate. For instance, Kayne (2005) argues that variation should be reduced to already variant properties of human language, namely the featural structure of (functional) items. Cinque (1999) shows that there is a universal hierarchy of adverbs. He argues that the language system has a universal ordering of functional projections hosting these adverbs. Languages may differ, however, in whether they employ all these projections or not and whether or not there is movement of elements through these projections. As also shown by Gianollo et al. (2008), these points of variation can be attributed to the feature specification of functional elements. For instance, whether or not there is movement to a certain functional head is related to the presence of an EPP-feature on it. 

It is clear that the question on the interaction between internal and external syntax raised above is highly relevant for furthering our understanding of variation. If, as Kayne, Cinque, and others suggest, the locus of variation is contained in the featural specifications of elements (and not in operations like Merge, Move, Agree), then we expect that variation in the internal structure or featural make-up should have predictable and identifiable effects in the external syntax, both with regards to the output of syntactic processes and the possible distributions of such XPs. Studying the interaction effects provides us with a window into the range of options of, as well as the limitations on, variation in this domain.

Organizing Institute:
NWO-project, The uniformity of linguistic variation, Utrecht University, UiL-OTS, The Netherlands

Organizers:
Heidi Klockmann, Franca Wesseling and Marjo van Koppen

Place of the workshop: Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Date: February 8-9, 2016

Invited Speakers:

Roberta D'Alessandro (Leiden University, Netherlands)
Michelle Sheehan (Anglia Ruskin University, UK)
Martina Wiltschko (University of British Columbia, Canada)

Call for Papers:

We invite papers on questions relating to the interaction between the internal and external syntax, in particular focusing on the cross-linguistic/cross-dialectal and diachronic variation in this domain. 

Abstract Submission:

Submissions are limited to one individual and one joint abstract per author. Abstracts should be anonymous, no more than 2 pages long, with 12-point font and 1-inch margins, and should be submitted electronically in PDF. The subject line of the email message should read “abstract” and the body of the message should contain the following information:

- Title of the paper
- Name(s) of the author(s)
- Affiliation(s)
- Email address(es)

Submissions should be sent to: h.e.klockmann at uu.nl

Deadline for submission: November 23, 2015
Notification of acceptance: December 7, 2015

More Information:

You can also make use of this email address for more information. Furthermore, you can look at the workshop website:

http://www.linguisticvariation.com/events/

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