Reminder: call for papers 20th ICHL workshop "The diachrony of referential null arguments" - Final deadline Jan. 15

[Silvia Luraghi]

Workshop title: The diachrony of referential null arguments



Venue: 20 International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Osaka 25-30
July 2011

            (see http://www.ichl2011.com )

 Convenors:      Dag Haug (University of Oslo) / Silvia Luraghi (University
of Pavia)
Contact:        d.t.t.haug at ifikk.uio.no   /   silvia.luraghi at unipv.it

 Deadline for final submission: 15 January 2011

http://www.ichl2011.com/call_for_papers.html



*Workshop description*



Definite referential null arguments are apparently one of the distinctive
features of non-configurational languages, see Baker (2001). Even though
descriptions are available for various genetically unrelated languages,
there are little if any accounts of their diachrony. Our workshop aims to
bring together scholars working on different language families and on
typologically different languages who are interested in diachronic changes
concerning the creation or disappearance of null arguments, with a focus on
null objects or other types of null arguments not coreferenced on the verb.

   The rise of null objects deserves further investigation. Null objects can
be the result of incorporation, wherebt object clitics become verb affixes
(Baker 2001). Related to incorporation is the Hungarian objective
conjugation, whose rise is also a possible topic of discussion.

   The occurrence of definite referential null objects has been observed in
many ancient Indo-European languages. In spite of this, and in spite of the
long documented history of these languages, even in their case historical
accounts are limited, as are detailed studies of the conditions licensing
null objects (Schäufele 1990 on Sanskrit; several studies have been devoted
to null objects in Old Icelandic, Sigurðsson 1993). At least in Latin and
possibly in Greek, null objects seem to be obligatory in coordinated
sentences, unless emphasis or disambiguation are involved (this is possibly
a common phenomenon connected to coordination reduction and frequent in
non-Indo-European languages as well, Luraghi 2004), as well as in answers to
yes/no questions (van der Wurff  1997). Descriptions of increasing use of
over objects in Latin and Germanic point to increasing transitivity or
emerging configurationality.

Papers presented at the workshop should aim to assess:

a) the relation between null objects and other parameters of
configurationality;

b) the relation of null objects to other null argument, in particular to
null subjects;

c) the relation between null objects and the parameter of head/dependent
marking (Baker 2001);

d) null objects and the grammaticalization of valency;

e) incorporation and the rise of null objects.

Papers should have a diachronic orientation; research based on extensive
corpora and quantitative approaches to language change are especially
encouraged.

* *

*References*

Baker, Mark (2001), ‘Configurationality and polysynthesis’, in M.
Haspelmath, E. König, W. Oesterreicher, W. Raible (eds.),  *Language
Typology and Language Universals . An International Handbook*. Berlin/New
York: Mouton de Gruyter, vol. 2, pp. 1433-41.

Luraghi, Silvia 2004, ‘Null Objects in Latin and Greek and the Relevance of
Linguistic Typology for Language Reconstruction’, in *Proceedings of the
15th Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference**, JIES Monograph 49,* pp.234-256.

Schäufele, Steven (1990), *Free Word-Order Syntax: the Challenge from Vedic
Sanskrit to Contemporary Formal Syntactic Theory*. Ph. D. dissertation,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Sigurðsson, Halldór A. (1993), ‘Argument-drop in Old Islandic’.  *Lingua *89,
247-280.

Wurff, Wim van der, 1994.  “Null objects and learnability: The case of
Latin”, *Working Papers of Holland Institute for Generative Linguistics*1/4.
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