30.4019, Calls: Historical Ling, Morphology, Syntax, Typology/Romania

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-30-4019. Wed Oct 23 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.4019, Calls: Historical Ling, Morphology, Syntax, Typology/Romania

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Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2019 06:22:56
From: Rik van Gijn [e.van.gijn at hum.leidenuniv.nl]
Subject: Differential Argument Marking and Clause Types

 
Full Title: Differential Argument Marking and Clause Types 

Date: 26-Aug-2020 - 29-Aug-2020
Location: Bucharest, Romania 
Contact Person: Rik van Gijn
Meeting Email: e.van.gijn at hum.leidenuniv.nl

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Morphology; Syntax; Typology 

Call Deadline: 17-Nov-2019 

Meeting Description:

Differential argument marking (DAM) refers to the phenomenon that languages
use different morphological means (case/adposition marking or agreement) to
code the same argument role (S, A, P, etc.) depending on the properties of the
argument and/or its grammatical context. A very common, but not well
understood type of DAM is the one in which a particular kind of marking is
found in one type of clause, whereas in some other type of clause the relevant
argument is marked differently. This can be illustrated with data from the
Tupian language Guajá (Magalhaes 2007, p. 16, 267):

(1a) jahá a-xá
I   1-see
‘I saw him.’
(1b) a-jú   ha-xak-á
1-come 3-see-GER
‘I came to see him.’

The first sentence marks the A argument of the verb ‘to see’, the second marks
the P argument. The contrast between these two examples is part of a more
general pattern where main clause argument indexing is characterized by
co-argument sensitivity (and split-intransitivity), whereas dependent clauses
are characterized by an ergative indexing system, marking the absolutive
participant on the verb.
Although there are some accounts of clause-based DAM in individual languages
or groups of languages (e.g. Dixon 1994: 101–104, Gildea 1998),
clause-type-based DAM and resulting alignment splits are not sufficiently well
understood. There may be several reasons for this. First, there may be a
problem of data availability: clause-type-based DAM is infrequently reported
even in extensive language descriptions, possibly due to the often
main-clause-focused nature of grammatical descriptions.

Second, there may be a variability problem: the variation in patterns may be
too great to readily reveal meaningful or generalizable patterns, or less so
than with other types of DAM (see e.g. Harris & Campbell 1986: 243). This in
turn may have to do with the fact that clause-type-based alignment splits are
the result of the often assumed differential pace of change in main and
subordinate clauses leading to discrepancies between main and subordinate
clauses (e.g. Ross 1973, Bybee 2002), and that different patterns simply
reflect different moments in genealogical histories. 
A third challenge is granularity, in that commonly-used categories, such as
“main” and “subordinate”, may be too broad. Depending on the language, “main
clauses” are a cover term for a collection of clause types, e.g. based on
illocution, information structure, predicate type, etc. Likewise,
“subordinate'' or “dependent” clauses potentially comprise many different
structures: complement clauses, relative clauses, and adverbial clauses and
semantic distinctions within these groups, but also nominalizations versus
finite clauses, compact constructions (control structures, multi-verb
constructions) vs. elaborate constructions, referentially restricted versus
referentially unrestricted clauses, etc. These different constructions may
have arisen via different diachronic scenarios, and therefore behave in
different ways e.g. with respect to argument marking.

References:

Bybee, JL 2002. Main clauses are innovative, subordinate clauses are
conservative. In: J. Bybee & M. Noonan (eds.), Complex sentences in grammar
and discourse. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1-17.
Dixon, RMW. 1994. Ergativity. Cambridge: CUP.
Gildea, S. 1998. On Reconstructing Grammar: Comparative Cariban Morphosyntax.
Oxford: OUP.
Harris, AC. & L Campbell. 1986. Historical syntax in cross-linguistic
perspective. Cambridge: CUP.
Magalhaes, MM Silva. 2007. Sobre a morfologia e a sintaxe da língua Guajá.
Doctoral dissertation, Universidade de Brasília.
Ross, JR. 1973. The penthouse principle and the order of constituents. In CT
Corum, TC Smith-Stark & A Weiser (eds.), You Take the High Node and I’ll Take
the Low Node. Chicago: CLS, 397-422.


Call for Papers:

Our aim in this workshop is to come to cross-linguistic generalizations on
clause-type-based splits by taking a more fine-grained perspective. We invite
potential contributors to send in an abstract that highlights differences in
alignment systems in (subtypes of) main clauses and (subtypes of) subordinate
clauses. We invite case studies on individual languages, but emphatically also
comparative studies either within or across language families, as well as
studies with an areal focus.

We are interested in contributions presenting i) cross-linguistic studies of
synchronic patterns of DAM based on clause types and ii) diachronic studies
investigating the emergence of clause-type based differential argument
marking, iii) studies of individual languages with clause-type-based splits
that increase the empirical basis for generalizations.

We would like the contributions to explore one or more of the following
questions:

- How different diachronic sources result in clause-type triggered DAM
synchronically?
- Do certain types of clauses gravitate towards specific alignment patterns?
Is there a functional explanation for such a drift?
- Are what seem to be clause type-based cases of differential marking better
captured in terms of the morphological form of the verb (e.g. nominalized
verbs, participles, converbs, etc.)?
- How stable is clause type-based DAM, both within language families and
within linguistic areas? Does clause-type-based DAM diffuse easily from one
language to the other?

Abstracts of no more than 300 words (excluding references) should be sent,
before November 17 2019 to e.van.gijn at hum.leidenuniv.nl. 

If accepted, the workshop will be held during the 53rd Annual Meeting of the
Societas Linguistica Europaea in Bucharest, Romania, 26-29 August 2020. The
submission process of the SLE takes place over several rounds:

20 November 2019: submission of workshop proposals (with short abstracts)
15 December 2019: notification of acceptance/rejection workshop
15 January 2020: individual submission of extended abstracts




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