First call for papers: 'Syntactic Government and Subcategorisation' conference

[Anna Kibort]

                   FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

'Explorations in Syntactic Government and Subcategorisation'
     Wednesday 31 August 2011 - Saturday 3 September 2011
                 University of Cambridge, UK

Conference website: http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~ak243/gvt/

Linguistic fields

General Linguistics, Linguistic Typology, Syntax, Morphology, Formal 
Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, Psycholinguistics

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION DEADLINE:  	Monday, 4 April 2011
Notification of acceptance:	Monday, 18 April 2011
Conference dates:	Wednesday, 31 August - Saturday, 3 September 2011 
(lunchtime finish)
Selected papers due for publication:  	Wednesday, 30 November 2011

Abstract submission

Abstract submission instructions will be posted on the conference website and 
sent out to linguistic lists by February 2011.

Meeting description

In traditional linguistic description, agreement and government are two types 
of featural dependency which link linguistic elements making up a clause. The 
features which are involved in agreement and government are identified through 
inflectional morphology, and the particular featural dependency between the 
relevant elements is captured with a syntactic rule, e.g. 'adjectives agree in 
gender with their head nouns', or 'verbs of this class govern genitive case of 
their objects'. Agreement and government are traditionally distinguished by the 
fact that under agreement

'two or more words or phrases are "inflected" for the same category (e.g. 
number or person), whereas under government the principal and the dependent 
member of a syntactic construction do not both exhibit the same category: 
instead the dependent member is determined with respect to the relevant 
category (e.g. case) by the principal member' [John Lyons, Introduction to 
Theoretical Linguistics 1968: 241].

Therefore, agreement can be seen as 'displaced information' - where one element 
carries the grammatical meaning relevant to another; while government can be 
seen as a 'brand mark' - here an element requires another element to carry 
grammatical meaning relevant to the relationship between them.

Although this distinction is accepted by most linguists, our understanding of 
government is surprisingly incomplete. Since there is no generally agreed upon 
definition of government, the interpretation of the notions of the 'principal 
member', 'dependent member', and 'being determined by' can vary considerably 
between linguistic frameworks. There is no systematic inventory of government 
phenomena and no criteria by which to identify less typical instances of 
government. Syntactic accounts which offer to model government are often 
incompatible with one another and may not correspond to accounts from 
inflectional morphology. The term 'governs' sometimes appears to be simply a 
substitute for 'requires [a particular form of an element]', revealing the lack 
of understanding of the possible general mechanism behind this requirement. At 
other times, government as a syntactic dependency may be equated with 
subcategorisation; however, there is no consensus about where to draw the line 
between subcategorisation, semantic selection, and co-occurrence.

The conference aims to bring together descriptive linguists, typologists, 
theoretical, computational and corpus linguists who wish to contribute to the 
understanding and modelling of the phenomenon of government and 
subcategorisation. It is hoped that the papers will involve both expertly 
summarised overviews of different approaches to syntactic government which have 
been proposed but never brought together for direct comparison, as well as new 
descriptions of challenging phenomena from typologically diverse languages 
together with their cutting-edge analyses. Computational, corpus-based and 
language processing perspectives on dependency and government are very welcome. 
Linguists representing different standpoints will be asked to spell out their 
assumptions in order to facilitate cross-theoretical and cross-disciplinary 
discussion.

Keynote speakers

The following speakers have already agreed to give invited talks at the 
conference (with provisional titles):

Farrell Ackerman (UC San Diego)
   'Predicates and argument selection: case and grammatical functions'
Balthasar Bickel (Leipzig)
   'Grammatical Relations: what's where why?'
Christian Lehmann (Erfurt)
   'Conceptual bases and structural correlates of government'
Silvia Luraghi (Pavia)
   'Variable case government'
Adam Przepiórkowski (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw)
   'Automatic acquisition of subcategorisation from large text corpora'
Ian Roberts (Cambridge)
   'Government: agreement and minimality'

Call for papers

Papers are invited which address topics related to syntactic government and 
subcategorisation, and the morphosyntax of governed categories. These may 
include, but are not limited to:

- Description and analysis of uncertain or disputed instances of government, in 
familiar or underdescribed languages
- Unusual or unexpected governors, governees, or governed categories
- Criteria for canonical vs non-canonical government
- Modelling variable case government
- Modelling dependence of case government on another category (e.g. 
tense-aspect-mood-polarity)
- Typology of syntactic dependency and government
- Government vs agreement
- Government vs subcategorisation
- Government vs collocation
- Syntactic government in computational grammars
- Corpus-based studies of dependency and government
- Language processing perspectives on syntactic government

Publication

Following the conference, a selection of externally refereed papers will be 
included in a volume dedicated to 'Syntactic Government', to be published with 
a major publisher.

Venue

The conference will take place in the new building of the English Faculty, 
University of Cambridge (http://www.cam.ac.uk). Accommodation (modern rooms) 
for participants has been reserved in historic Cambridge colleges. Conference 
dinner will be held in the Old Hall at Queens' College, arguably the most 
impressive mediaeval dining hall in Cambridge. All conference locations are 
central and within 10 minutes' walk of each other. Cambridge offers a 
spectacular location for a conference, with its amazing mix of historic and 
modern buildings, lush college gardens, and world-famous museums and libraries. 
It also has a vibrant musical and theatre scene, with outdoor performances of 
Shakespeare, and concerts of music of all periods performed in college chapels, 
city churches and modern concert venues. It is only 50 minutes away by direct 
train from central London.

Organisers:

Anna Kibort (University of Cambridge)    ak243 @ cam.ac.uk
Arturas Ratkus (University of Cambridge)    ar392 @ cam.ac.uk

Further information about the venue and the conference, as well as 
accommodation and registration details will be posted on the conference website 
closer to the date.