27.951, Calls: Syntax, Typology/Mexico

Tue Feb 23 19:23:41 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-951. Tue Feb 23 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.951, Calls: Syntax, Typology/Mexico

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Date: Tue, 23 Feb 2016 14:23:35
From: Sonia Cristofaro [sonia.cristofaro at unipv.it]
Subject: The Diachrony of Nominalization and Nominalizers

Full Title: The Diachrony of Nominalization and Nominalizers 

Date: 20-Aug-2016 - 20-Aug-2016
Location: Mexico City, Mexico 
Contact Person: Sonia Cristofaro
Meeting Email: sonia.cristofaro at unipv.it
Web Site: http://swl-7.weebly.com/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Syntax; Typology 

Call Deadline: 15-Apr-2016 

Meeting Description:

Over the past decades, nominalization has been the object of renewed attention
in typologically oriented studies. While traditionally investigated in
relation to subordinate clauses, word formation, and parts of speech classes
(Koptjevskaja-Tamm 1993, Croft 1991 and 2001, Hengeveld 1992, Malchukov 2004,
Comrie and Thompson 2007), nominalization has been shown to play a pervasive
role in a wider variety of grammatical domains cross-linguistically. For
example, the reanalysis of consructions involving nominalizations can give
rise to new alignment, TAM, voice and word order patterns (Gildea 1998, Yap
and Wrona 2011, among others). The ellipsis of a main predicate taking a
nominalized complement can lead to a pattern where the latter is used
independently to convey the meaning originally associated with the
construction as a whole (insubordination: Evans 2007, Mithun 2008, Cristofaro
to appear).

While these phenomena highlight several diachronic processes applying to
nominalizations, research on nominalization has mainly remained synchronically
oriented so far. General studies of nominalization have produced
classifications of the synchronic structural and semantic properties of
different nominalization types, in terms, for example, of argument structure,
presence vs. absence of dedicated morphology, or the entity type denoted by
the construction (Koptjevskaja-Tamm 1993, Malchukov 2004, Comrie and Thompson
2007). Comparatively little attention has, however, been devoted to the
diachronic origins of nominalization, that is, what source constructions give
rise to nominalizations in the first place, to what extent these constructions
motivate the properties of the resulting nominalizations, and why the latter
are initially used in certain contexts as opposed to others.

Some cross-linguistic evidence is now available about a number of possible
sources for nominalizers, including for example demonstratives and nouns
meaning ‘person’, ‘thing’, ‘matter’, ‘place’ and the like (DeLancey 1986,
Carlson 1994, Noonan 1997, LaPolla 2003, Yap and Wang
2011, Yap and Wrona 2011). This evidence is in principle relevant to various
general issues pertaining to nominalization, for example the idea the
properties of individual nominalizations reflect non-prototypical uses of the
relevant lexical roots (Cristofaro 2012), or the relationship between
nominalization and a number of word order correlations (Givón 2012). The
relevant data are, however, scanty, and they are usually not discussed in
relation to the properties of the resulting nominalizations, or theories of
nominalization in general. The workshop aims to bring together scholars
working on nominalization in a diachronic perspective, with the general goal
to expand our knowledge of the processes that can give rise to nominalizations
cross-linguistically, and investigate possible relationships between these
processes and the properties of the resulting constructions, for example in
terms of argument structure, presence vs. absence of nominalizers, nominal vs.
verbal properties, or distribution across different contexts, e.g. different
types of complement, adverbial, or relative clauses. Contributions on the
history of particular nominalization types in individual languages and ones
investigating the relevant processes in a broader cross-linguistic perspective
are equally welcome.

Call for Papers:

Organizers: Sonia Cristofaro (university of Pavia), Eitan Grossman (University
of Jerusalem)

The workshop will be held adjacent to the conference `Syntax of the
World's Languages VII (SWL7)', UNAM, Mexico City, 17-19 August 2016

Abstracts:
Please send your abstracts to the organizers

sonia.cristofaro at unipv.it
eitan.grossman at mail.huji.ac.il

by April 15, 2016. Notification of acceptance is by April 30, 2016.
Abstracts should be in English, in pdf format, no longer than two pages
(including examples
and references) and anonymous. The language of the workshop is English.

References:

Carlson, R. (1994). A Grammar of Supyire. Berlin and New York: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Comrie, B. and S. A. Thompson (2007). Lexical nominalization. In T. Shopen
(Ed.), Language
Typology and Syntactic Description. 2nd Edition, Volume 3: Grammatical
Categories and
the Lexicon, pp. 334–81. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cristofaro, S. (2012). Cognitive explanations, distributional evidence, and
diachrony. Studies in
Language 36, 645–70.
Cristofaro, S. (To appear). Routes to Insubordination: a Cross-Linguistic
Perspective. In
N. Evans and Honoré Watanabe (Eds.), Dynamics of Insubordination. Amsterdam:
John
Benjamins.
Croft, W. (1991). Syntactic Categories and Grammatical Relations. Chicago and
London: The
University of Chicago Press.
Croft, W. (2001). Radical Construction Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
DeLancey, S. (1986). Relativization as nominalization in Tibetan and Newari’.
Ms, University
of Oregon. Available online at
http://tibeto-burman.net/nominalizationworkshop.html.
Evans, N. (2007). Insubordination and its uses. In I. Nikolaeva (Ed.),
Finiteness: all over the
clause, pp. 366–431. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gildea, S. (1998). On reconstructing grammar : Comparative Cariban
morphosyntax. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Givón, T. (2012). Towards a diachronic typology of relative clause. In B.
Comrie and Z. Estrada-
Fernández (Eds.), Relative clauses in the languages of the Americas, pp. 1–26.
Amsterdam
and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Hengeveld, K. (1992). Non-verbal predication. Berlin and New York: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Koptjevskaja-Tamm, M. (1993). Nominalizations. London and New York: Routledge.
LaPolla, R. J. (2003). Qiang. In G. Thurgood and R. J. LaPolla (Eds.), The
Sino-Tibetan Languages,
pp. 573–87. Routledge.
Malchukov, A. (2004). Nominalization/verbalization: Constraining a typology of
transcategorial
operations. München and Newcastle: Lincom Europa.
Mithun, M. (2008). The extension of dependency beyond the sentence. Language
83, 69–119.
Noonan, M. (1997). Versatile Nominalizations. In Bybee, J. Haiman, J. and S.
A. Thompson (Eds.),
Essays in language function and language type, pp. 373–94. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Yap, F. H. and J. Wang (2011). From light noun to nominalizer and more: The
grammaticalization
of zhe and suo in old and middle chinese. In K. Grunow-Hasta , Foong Ha and J.
Wrona (Eds.),
Nominalization in Asian Languages: Diachronic and typological perspectives,
pp. 59–108.
Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Yap, Foong Ha, K. Grunow-Hasta and J. Wrona (2011). Introduction.
Nominalization strategies in Asian
languages. In K. Grunow-Hasta Yap, Foong Ha and J. Wrona (Eds.),
Nominalization in Asian Languages:
Diachronic and typological perspectives, pp. 1–57. Amsterdam and Philadelphia:
John Benjamins.

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