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

[johanna.barddal at UIB.NO]

On behalf of Anna Kibort!
Jóhanna Barðdal

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                    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.