35.600, Calls: Adverbial Clauses in Argument Positions
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LINGUIST List: Vol-35-600. Tue Feb 20 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.
Subject: 35.600, Calls: Adverbial Clauses in Argument Positions
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Date: 19-Feb-2024
From: Łukasz Jędrzejowski [l.jedrzejowski at uni-koeln.de]
Subject: Adverbial Clauses in Argument Positions
Full Title: Adverbial Clauses in Argument Positions
Date: 05-Apr-2024 - 06-Apr-2024
Location: Berlin, Germany
Contact Person: Łukasz Jędrzejowski
Meeting Email: adverbial-clauses at uni-koeln.de
Web Site: http://www.lukasz-jedrzejowski.eu/adverbial-clauses-2/
Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Semantics; Syntax; Typology
Call Deadline: 10-Mar-2024
Meeting Description:
Adverbial clauses are usually employed as sentential adjuncts that
restrict the truth value of the matrix clause or that provide a
motivation for why a speech act is uttered. Derivationally, they
involve a Pair-Merge operation. Complement clauses, in turn, occupy an
argument position of a clause-embedding expression, satisfy its
theta-grid, and involve a Set-Merge operation. Interestingly enough,
cross-linguistic studies have shown that adverbial clauses, in
particular conditional clauses, can also occur in argument positions
and be embedded under selected classes of clause-embedding predicates,
cf. Williams (1974), Pullum (1987), Pesetsky (1991), Rocchi (2010),
Thompson (2012), Sode (2021) for English, Fabricius-Hansen (1980),
Schmid (1987), Onea (2015), Schwabe (2015, 2016) for German, Quer
(2002) for Romance, and Steriopolo (2016) for Russian, cf. (1) for
‘if’ in English:
(1) John would like it if Mary knew French.
(Pesetsky 1991: 59, ex. 227a)
However, apart from few case studies (cf. e.g. Jędrzejowski 2020 on
hypothetical-comparative clauses in Polish or Berlet 2021 on temporal
clauses in German), less is known about other adverbial clause types
and their licensing in argument positions.
Furthermore, complement clauses often compete with other types of
subordinate clauses introduced by the adjuncts wh-phrases ‘when’,
‘how’, and occasionally by ‘why’, giving rise to a temporal,
conditional, manner, or reason interpretation (cf. Caponigro & Pearl
2009 and Hinterwimmer 2010 for ‘when’, Corver 2023, Legate 2010,
Liefke 2023, Umbach et al. 2022, 2023, among many others, for ‘how’,
and Caponigro & Fălăuls 2023 for ‘why’), as (2) for ‘when’ and (3) for
‘how’ show:
(2) Paul hates it when his colleague snores.
(Hinterwimmer 2010: 176, ex. 1a)
(3) They told me how the tooth fairy doesn't really exist.
(Legate 2010: 121, ex. 1)
However, the question of how the subordinate wh-clauses are related to
and differ from argument adverbial clauses has, to our knowledge, not
been addressed so far. Nor is it clear how to account for the
cross-linguistic differences pointed out in the literature.
The main aim of the conference is, therefore, to bring together recent
theoretical and experimental investigations on adverbial clauses and
subordinate clauses introduced by adjunct wh-phrases occurring in
argument positions. Due to a rich inventory of adverbial conjunctions
and various classes of clause-embedding predicates, we hope to gain
novel theoretical insights into how lexical properties of embedding
expressions affect their selection.
The international conference on "Adverbial clauses in argument
positions" is the fourth meeting of the scientific network "Adverbial
clauses and subordinate dependency relationships" funded by German
Science Foundation granted to Łukasz Jędrzejowski (grant number
455700544). The conference will be hosted by the ‘Institut für
Deutsche und Niederländische Philologie’ at the Free University of
Berlin, on April 5–6, 2024, and is organized by Andreas Pankau and
Łukasz Jędrzejowski.
Invited speakers (all confirmed):
– Keir Moulton (University of Toronto)
– David Pesetsky (MIT)
– Susanne Wurmbrand (University of Vienna & Harvard University)
Selected references:
Berlet, Sophie. 2021. Temporale als-Sätze. Bachelor's thesis,
University of Cologne.
Caponigro, Ivano & Lisa Pearl. 2009. The nominal nature of where,
when, and how: Evidence from free relatives. Linguistic Inquiry 40(1):
155–164.
Hinterwimmer, Stefan. 2010. When-clauses, factive verbs and
correlates. In Gisbert Fanselow & Thomas Hanneforth (eds.), Language
and Logos: Festschrift for Peter Staudacher on his 70th Birthday
(Studia Grammatica 72), 176–189. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
Legate, Julie Anne. 2010. On how how is used instead of that. Natural
Language and Linguistic Theory 28(1): 121–134.
Pesetsky, David. 1991. Zero Syntax, vol. 2: Infinitives. Manuscript,
MIT < http://lingphil.mit.edu/papers/pesetsk/infins.pdf>.
Call for Papers:
Topics for the conference include, but are not limited to, the
following questions:
– Which types of adverbial clauses can be used in argument positions?
What classes of clause-embedding expressions are they compatible with?
– To what extent can the subordinate dependency relationship between
the clause-embedding expression and the adverbial clause/subordinate
wh-clause be defined as a compatibility relation (cf. Safir 2021)? How
do they match? How to model the relation between meaning and
combinatorial restrictions?
– How do adverbial clauses attach to the matrix clause when they
occupy an argument position? Do they involve a single structure
building operation (e.g. Set-Merge) or are additional operations
needed (cf. e.g. Pesetsky's 1991 ‘If Copying Rule’ for conditional
clauses)?
– What do argument adverbial clauses/subordinate wh-clauses teach us
about c-selection and s-selection (cf. Grimshaw 1979)? Do adverbial
clauses occurring in argument positions trigger a semantic change of
the clause-embedding expression?
– What are the differences between argument adverbial clauses and
canonical complement clauses headed by the complementizer ‘that’?
Where do these differences come from?
– How did the semantics of clause-embedding expressions change over
time and how did it affect their selectional restrictions?
At this conference we would like to address syntactic and semantic
issues relating to the use of adverbial clauses/subordinate wh-clauses
in argument positions including cross-linguistic patterns and case
studies from less known languages.
The conference will be preceded by a one-day international workshop on
mood alternation in adverbial clauses.
We invite submission of abstracts for 40-minute oral presentations
(with additional 20 minutes for questions) on topics that address the
use of adverbial clauses in argument positions. These may include case
studies as well as formal theories of particular adverbial clause
types. We also welcome research at the interfaces with semantics and
other areas, as long as the research makes a contribution to the area
of adverbial clauses in argument positions.
Abstracts should be submitted in PDF format to
adverbial-clauses at uni-koeln.de, with all non-standard fonts embedded.
Abstracts should not exceed 2 pages, which includes the data. An
additional third page may be used for references. Abstracts must be
submitted in letter or A4 format with 1 inch or 2.5cm margins on all
sides, single-spaced, and in a font no smaller than 11pt. Abstracts
should be anonymous. Please make sure that PDF files do not have any
identifying metadata. Submissions are limited to one individual and
one joint abstract per author (or two joint abstracts per author).
Please submit abstracts to adverbial-clauses at uni-koeln.de no later
than March 10, 2024.
Notification: March 13, 2024
For inquiries, please send an e-mail to adverbial-clauses at uni-koeln.de
Selected references:
Berlet, Sophie. 2021. Temporale als-Sätze. Bachelor's thesis,
University of Cologne.
Caponigro, Ivano & Lisa Pearl. 2009. The nominal nature of where,
when, and how: Evidence from free relatives. Linguistic Inquiry 40(1):
155–164.
Grimshaw, Jane. 1979. Complement selection and the lexicon. Linguistic
Inquiry 10(2): 279–326.
Hinterwimmer, Stefan. 2010. When-clauses, factive verbs and
correlates. In Gisbert Fanselow & Thomas Hanneforth (eds.), Language
and Logos: Festschrift for Peter Staudacher on his 70th Birthday
(Studia Grammatica 72), 176–189. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
Legate, Julie Anne. 2010. On how how is used instead of that. Natural
Language and Linguistic Theory 28(1): 121–134.
Pesetsky, David. 1991. Zero Syntax, vol. 2: Infinitives. Manuscript,
MIT < http://lingphil.mit.edu/papers/pesetsk/infins.pdf>.
Safir, Ken. 2021. Clausal complementation as a compatibility relation.
In Neil Banerjee & Verena Hehl (eds.), Proceedings of TripleA 6. The
Semantics of African, Asian, and Austronesian Languages (MIT Working
Papers in Linguistics 91), 109–126. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT
Press.
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