[Lingtyp] Call for papers: The diachrony of nominalization and nominalizers (Workshop adjacent to SWL7, Mexico City, August 20th 2016))co

Tue Feb 23 14:30:38 UTC 2016

-----------APOLOGIES FOR CROSS-POSTING---------------------

*The diachrony of nominalization and nominalizers*
UNAM, Mexico City, August 20th, 2016 (Workshop adjacent to the conference
`Syntax of the World's Languages 7*',* UNAM, Mexico City, August 17-19th,
2016)

Organizers:
Sonia Cristofaro (University of Pavia)
Eitan Grossman (University of Jerusalem)

Over the past decades, nominalization has been the object of renewed
attention in typologically
oriented studies. While traditionally investigated in relation to
subordinate clauses, word formation, and parts of speech classes
(Koptjevskaja-Tamm 1993, Croft 1991 and 2001, Hengeveld 1992, Malchukov
2004, Comrie and Thompson 2007), nominalization has been shown to play a
pervasive role in a wider variety of grammatical domains
cross-linguistically. For example, the reanalysis of constructions
involving nominalizations can give rise to new alignment, TAM, voice and
word order patterns (Gildea 1998, Yap and Wrona 2011, among others). The
ellipsis of a main predicate taking a nominalized complement can lead to a
pattern where the latter is used independently to convey the meaning
originally associated with the construction as a whole, for example
background information, various types of modal meanings (wishes, requests,
commands, obligation, possibility), exclamations, or hot news
(insubordination: Evans 2007, Mithun 2008, Cristofaro to appear).

While these phenomena highlight several diachronic processes applying to
nominalizations
(in terms of reanalysis of the syntactic structure of the construction, or
extension of individual
constructions from one context to another), research on nominalization has
mainly remained synchronically oriented so far. General studies of
nominalization have produced classifications of the synchronic structural
and semantic properties of different nominalization types, in terms, for
example, of argument structure, presence vs. absence of dedicated
morphology, or the entity type denoted by the construction
(Koptjevskaja-Tamm 1993, Malchukov 2004, Comrie and Thompson 2007). Studies
focusing on nominalization in individual languages also usually describe
the synchronic range of contexts in which particular nominalizations are
used in the language, sometimes pointing to possible paths of extension
from one context to another. Comparatively little attention has, however,
been devoted to the diachronic origins of nominalization, that is, what
source constructions give rise to nominalizations in the first place, to
what extent these constructions motivate the properties of the resulting
nominalizations, and why the latter are initially used in certain contexts
as opposed to others.

Some cross-linguistic evidence is now available about a number of possible
sources for nominalizers, including for example demonstratives and nouns
meaning ‘person’, ‘thing’, ‘matter’,
‘place’ and the like (DeLancey 1986, Carlson 1994, Noonan 1997, LaPolla
2003, Yap and Wang
2011, Yap and Wrona 2011). This evidence is in principle relevant to
various general issues pertaining to nominalization, for example the idea
the properties of individual nominalizations reflect non-prototypical uses
of the relevant lexical roots (Cristofaro 2012), or the relationship
between nominalization and a number of word order correlations (Givón
2012). The relevant data are, however, scanty, and they are usually not
discussed in relation to the properties of the resulting nominalizations,
or theories of nominalization in general.

The workshop aims to bring together scholars working on nominalization in a
diachronic perspective, with the general goal to expand our knowledge of
the processes that can give rise to nominalizations cross-linguistically,
and investigate possible relationships between these processes and the
properties of the resulting constructions, for example in terms of argument
structure, presence vs. absence of nominalizers, nominal vs. verbal
properties, or distribution across different contexts, e.g. different types
of complement, adverbial, or relative clauses. Contributions on the history
of particular nominalization types in individual languages and ones
investigating the relevant processes in a broader cross-linguistic
perspective are equally welcome.

The workshop will be held adjacent to the conference ‘Syntax of the World’s
Languages VII
(SWL7)’, UNAM, Mexico City, 17-19 August 2016 (http://swl-7.weebly.com/).
Please refer to the
conference website for updates on the workshop.

*Abstracts*
Please send your abstracts to the organizers

sonia.cristofaro at unipv.it
eitan.grossman at mail.huji.ac.il

by *April 15th, 2016*. Notification of acceptance is by *April 30th, 2016*.
Abstracts should be in English, in pdf format, no longer than two pages
(including examples
and references) and anonymous. The language of the workshop is English.

*References*
Carlson, R. (1994). A Grammar of Supyire. Berlin and New York: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Comrie, B. and S. A. Thompson (2007). Lexical nominalization. In T. Shopen
(Ed.), Language
Typology and Syntactic Description. 2nd Edition, Volume 3: Grammatical
Categories and
the Lexicon, pp. 334–81. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cristofaro, S. (2012). Cognitive explanations, distributional evidence, and
diachrony. Studies in
Language 36, 645–70.
Cristofaro, S. (To appear). Routes to Insubordination: a Cross-Linguistic
Perspective. In
N. Evans and Honoré Watanabe (Eds.), Dynamics of Insubordination.
Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Croft, W. (1991). Syntactic Categories and Grammatical Relations. Chicago
and London: The
University of Chicago Press.
Croft, W. (2001). Radical Construction Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
DeLancey, S. (1986). Relativization as nominalization in Tibetan and
Newari’. Ms, University
of Oregon. Available online at
http://tibeto-burman.net/nominalizationworkshop.html.
Evans, N. (2007). Insubordination and its uses. In I. Nikolaeva (Ed.),
Finiteness: all over the
clause, pp. 366–431. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gildea, S. (1998). On reconstructing grammar : Comparative Cariban
morphosyntax. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Givón, T. (2012). Towards a diachronic typology of relative clause. In B.
Comrie and Z. Estrada-
Fernández (Eds.), Relative clauses in the languages of the Americas, pp.
1–26. Amsterdam
and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Hengeveld, K. (1992). Non-verbal predication. Berlin and New York: Mouton
de Gruyter.
Koptjevskaja-Tamm, M. (1993). Nominalizations. London and New York:
Routledge.
LaPolla, R. J. (2003). Qiang. In G. Thurgood and R. J. LaPolla (Eds.), The
Sino-Tibetan Languages,
pp. 573–87. Routledge.
Malchukov, A. (2004). Nominalization/verbalization: Constraining a typology
of transcategorial
operations. München and Newcastle: Lincom Europa.
Mithun, M. (2008). The extension of dependency beyond the sentence.
Language 83, 69–119.
Noonan, M. (1997). Versatile Nominalizations. In Joan, J. Haiman, and S. A.
Thompson (Eds.),
Essays in language function and language type, pp. 373–94. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Yap, F. H. and J. Wang (2011). From light noun to nominalizer and more: The
grammaticalization
of zhe and suo in old and middle chinese. In K. G.-H. , Foong Ha and J.
Wrona (Eds.),
Nominalization in Asian Languages: Diachronic and typological perspectives,
pp. 59–108.
Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Yap, Foong Ha, K. G.-H. and J. Wrona (2011). Introduction. Nominalization
strategies in Asian
languages. In K. G.-H. Yap, Foong Ha and J. Wrona (Eds.), Nominalization in
Asian Languages:
Diachronic and typological perspectives, pp. 1–57. Amsterdam and
Philadelphia:
John Benjamins.

-- 
--
Sonia Cristofaro
Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici
Sezione di Linguistica
Universita' di Pavia
Strada Nuova, 65
I-27100 Pavia
Italia
Tel. +390382984484
Fax +390382984487
E-mail: sonia.cristofaro at unipv.it
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20160223/44a259af/attachment.htm>