30.3866, Calls: General Linguistics, Linguistic Theories, Morphology/Romania

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-30-3866. Sun Oct 13 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.3866, Calls: General Linguistics, Linguistic Theories, Morphology/Romania

Moderator: Malgorzata E. Cavar (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Student Moderator: Jeremy Coburn
Managing Editor: Becca Morris
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Everett Green, Sarah Robinson, Peace Han, Nils Hjortnaes, Yiwen Zhang, Julian Dietrich
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Everett Green <everett at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: Sun, 13 Oct 2019 07:04:46
From: Chiara Melloni [chiara.melloni at univr.it]
Subject: Derivational Zero Affixes

 
Full Title: Derivational Zero Affixes 

Date: 26-Aug-2020 - 29-Aug-2020
Location: Bucharest, Romania 
Contact Person: Gianina Iordăchioaia
Meeting Email: gianina-nicoleta.iordachioaia at ling.uni-stuttgart.de

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Linguistic Theories; Morphology 

Call Deadline: 09-Nov-2019 

Meeting Description:

Since the early days of Sanskrit grammars, zero affixes, i.e., phonologically
null morphology with syntactic and semantic content, have proved instrumental
in describing language and have consistently been employed in this sense in
modern structuralist linguistics and their later adherent theories (see
Bergenholz & Mugdan 2000 and Dahl & Fábregas 2018 for overviews).
While inflectional zero affixes seem to be widely accepted by various
theoretical frameworks, there is an unsettled debate concerning the legitimacy
of derivational zero forms (e.g., Myers 1984, Pesetsky 1995, Plag 1999, Lieber
1992, Lieber 2004, Borer 2013). In general, positing a contentful zero
morpheme confronts us with a theoretical quandary in differentiating it from
the lack of a morpheme altogether: how do we know where there is a zero affix
and where there is nothing?
Several explanations have been put forward to account for zero derivation (or
conversion) phenomena, among which ‘relisting’ and underspecification are two
prominent hypotheses. Rather than an actual grammatical phenomenon, relisting
is a form of coinage triggered by pragmatic needs, where an entry gets listed
again in the lexicon with new category and associated meaning (Lieber 1981,
1992, 2004). In underspecification theories, the lexical category of words in
conversion pairs gets specified only in a syntactic context (Farrell 2001).
However, both relisting and underspecification fail to capture relevant
morphosyntactic and phonological constraints which would be explained under a
zero derivational approach (Don 1993, 2005, Darby 2015). Furthermore, the
issues of meaning indeterminacy, zero proliferation and ordering do not only
concern derivationally linked words; inflectional zero also appears with many
more facets than overt inflectional affixes do. Whether we posit several such
zero affixes with each individual meaning or a heavily underspecified one, why
would this be more legitimate in inflection than in derivation?
In a nutshell, the literature has highlighted various theoretical and
empirical advantages and disadvantages in the use of derivational zero
affixes. These often depend a lot on the foundational principles of each
framework and the methodology it employs, beyond the need of a faithful
empirical description.

In this workshop we aim to gather contributions that address derivational zero
affixes from the perspective of the following research questions:

1. What are the empirical and theoretical advantages and disadvantages of
positing derivational zero affixes? Are some theories more likely to posit
such affixes and how do they successfully implement them in the system? Why do
other theories find derivational zero undesirable?
2. How do derivational zero affixes differ from the inflectional ones? Are
they empirically and/or theoretically less motivated/more difficult to
implement than the latter and why?
3. How do derivational zero affixes resemble or differ from overt affixes
(their ‘overt analogues’)?
4. How do different theories of morphology deal with empirical phenomena for
which it would be tempting to posit a derivational zero affix?
5. To what extent can language-specific properties and typological
generalizations explain availability or unavailability of zero affixation
across languages? What does the crosslinguistic study of conversion phenomena
bring to our understanding of zero derivation, its empirical adequacy and
theoretical status?

Invited speakers: Heidi Harley, University of Arizona and Salvador Valera,
University of Granada

Convenors: Gianina Iordăchioaia and Chiara Melloni (University of Stuttgart &
University of Verona)


Call for Papers:

We welcome contributions that deal with these and other related issues from
any theory of morphology – whether of (syntactic or lexicalist) generative,
construction-based, or cognitive orientation. We aim to offer an interactive
platform for discussion with input from as diverse as possible a linguistic
community, including theoretical, empirical descriptive or data- oriented
contributions from psycholinguistics and computational linguistics.

Please submit an abstract of maximum 300 words (excluding references) to our
email addresses by November 9, 2019: gianina at ifla.uni-stuttgart.de and
chiara.melloni at univr.it

Important Dates:

9 November 2019: Deadline for submission of 300-word abstracts to organizers 
20 November 2019: Submission of the workshop proposals to SLE 
15 December 2019: Notification of acceptance of workshop proposals from SLE 
15 January 2020: Deadline for submission of all abstracts to SLE for review 
26–29 August 2020: SLE conference, University of Bucharest




------------------------------------------------------------------------------

***************************    LINGUIST List Support    ***************************
 The 2019 Fund Drive is under way! Please visit https://funddrive.linguistlist.org
  to find out how to donate and check how your university, country or discipline
     ranks in the fund drive challenges. Or go directly to the donation site:
               https://iufoundation.fundly.com/the-linguist-list-2019

                        Let's make this a short fund drive!
                Please feel free to share the link to our campaign:
                    https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/
 


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-30-3866	
----------------------------------------------------------