[Lingtyp] Call for Abstracts: Complex Sentences in South American Languages, Nov 17-19, 2021 (online)

[khaude at uni-koeln.de]

Workshop on Complex Sentences in South American Languages

Call for Abstracts

In recent years, the research on Native South American languages has  
seen a rising interest in complex sentence structure (van Gijn et al.  
2011, van Gijn et al. 2014, Amaral et al. 2018, Overall et al 2018,  
Zariquiey et al. 2019). Languages of South America show phenomena that  
are challenging for the traditional definitions of complex sentence  
structures. For instance, the traditional definitions of adverbial,  
complement, and relative clauses are questioned by so-called headless  
and internally-headed relative clauses, or by adverbial clauses  
performing the predication function in copular sentences. A further  
issue is establishing to what extent subordinate clauses are nominal  
and whether subordinating conjunctions may be alternatively analyzed  
as adpositions in some of these languages. In some language families  
of South America, furthermore, the syntactic distinction between  
lexical classes such as verbs and nouns is weak or diachronically  
young, which makes it more difficult to grasp categories like  
relativization or nominalization.

This workshop, which will be organized at the research lab SEDYL  
(CNRS–INALCO–IRD) in Villejuif/France and held via Zoom, intends to  
bring together experts on Native South American languages from both a  
functional-typological and a formalist background. The objective is to  
help researchers from different backgrounds to find a common ground in  
the way they describe the different phenomena involved in complex  
sentences.

Abstracts (max. 500 words, examples included) are invited for papers  
discussing any of the following topics in Native South American  
languages:

- similarities and differences among different types of complex  
sentence structures
- the morphological and syntactic properties of the (clausal)  
complements of nonverbal predicates
- subordination phenomena in relation to flexible vs. rigid lexical  
classes in a language
- co-reference between arguments of main and embedded clauses
- similarities and differences between adpositional phrases, adverbial  
phrases, and adjuncts
- the relationship between typological properties of the language  
(e.g. constituent order, alignment type) and its subordination phenomena
- complex sentences in a diachronic perspective

Both in the abstracts and in the conference papers, authors should  
keep in mind the heterogeneous audience and avoid or explain  
theory-specific terminology.

Invited speakers:
Rik van Gijn
Guillaume Thomas
Adam Singerman


Important dates:
Submission of abstracts: 	July 20, 2021
Notification of acceptance: 	September 20, 2021
Online conference dates: 	November 17-19, 2021


Scientific committee:
Luciana Storto (organizer)
Katharina Haude (organizer)
Natalia Cáceres
Patience Epps
Hein van der Voort
Guillaume Thomas
Filomena Sandalo
Andrés Pablo Salanova
Adam Singerman


Abstracts should be sent to: storto at usp.br and katharina.haude at cnrs.fr

References:
Amaral, Luiz, Marcus Maia, Andrew Nevins & Tom Roeper (eds.). 2018.  
Recursion Across Domains. Cambridge University Press.

Overall, Simon, Rosa Vallejos & Spike Gildea (eds.). 2018. Nonverbal  
Predication in Amazonian Languages. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins  
[=Typological Studies in Language, 122].

van Gijn, Rik, Katharina Haude, and Pieter Muysken (eds.). 2011.  
Subordination in South American Languages. Amsterdam/Philadelphia:  
Benjamins [=Typological Studies in Language, 97].

Van Gijn, J. Hammond, D. Matiç, S. van Putten & V. Galucio (eds.)  
2014. Information Structure and Reference Tracking in Complex  
Sentences. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins [=Typological Studies in  
Language, 105].

Zariquiey, Roberto, Masayoshi Shibatani, and David W. Fleck (eds.).  
2019. Nominalization in Languages of the Americas.  
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins [=Typological Studies in Language,  
124].