[Lingtyp] SLE 2025: Workshop proposal on omnipredicativity

Thu Oct 17 09:49:48 UTC 2024

Dear colleagues,

Please find below (and attached, in a nicer format) a call for  
abstracts for yet another workshop proposal for the SLE 2025 conference.

The deadline for abstract submission is November 10th, 2024.

Do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions on content  
and/or modalities of the call.

All best,
Katharina and Albert

======================================================================

Call for papers
For a workshop proposal for the 58th SLE meeting in Bordeaux, August  
26-29, 2025

Workshop title: Omnipredicativity: its core and its fringes
Convenors: Katharina Haude (CNRS–SEDYL), Albert Álvarez (Universidad  
de Hermosillo)

In some languages, both verbs and nouns can function both as  
predicates and as arguments: nouns can be used as main-clause  
predicates without the need of a copula, and verbs can be combined  
with some determiner-like element, with which they form a determiner  
phrase (DP). In the canonical type of this system, a DP containing a  
verb refers to a participant in the event denoted by the verb, so that  
the verb can be analyzed as a headless relative clause (‘the  
one/someone who Vs’). This is illustrated in (1) with examples from  
Classical Nahuatl (Launey 1994: 29; 58). The clause in (1a) is a  
typical intransitive clause with a verbal predicate and a nominal  
argument DP, whereas in (1b), the predicate is a noun and the DP  
contains a verb.

(1)       
a.                chōca         [in         piltōntli]
cry                 DET        child
‘the child is crying’

b.               
ca         piltōntli         [in         chōca]
ASSERT        child         DET        cry
‘the one who is crying is a child’

The term “omnipredicative” for such a system was coined by Launey  
(1994; 2004) on the basis of Classical Nahuatl. The idea is that in a  
language of this type, all content words are primarily predicates. The  
referential function is derived through the combination with a  
determiner, the resulting structure being analyzable as an oriented  
nominalization or a headless relative clause (‘the one who is/was X’;  
Launey 2004: 55–56).

Besides Classical Nahuatl, systems in which verbs and nouns are  
syntactically interchangeable have also been described for other  
languages of the Americas, such as Salishan languages (e.g. Jelinek &  
Demers 1994), Mayan (Vapnarsky 2013), Tupi-Guaranian languages (da  
Cruz & Praça 2019), or Movima (Haude 2019), but also beyond, as for  
Tagalog (Himmelmann 1991; Himmelmann 2008) or Khoekhoe (Hahn 2014).

Omnipredicativity has sometimes been understood in the literature as  
implying that a language lacks lexical categories (Evans & Osada 2005;  
Beck 2013) or that all its content words are verbs (Bisang 2013). Yet,  
even though the tendency is to reduce the distance between lexical  
classes, omnipredicativity does not imply noun/verb indistinction.  
Rather, the syntactic flexibility of nouns and verbs contributes to  
the information-structuring potential that is central to an  
omnipredicative system (Launey 2004: 49, 69). As illustrated by the  
translation, the construction in (1b) is pragmatically marked: placing  
a noun in predicate position (‘It is N’) and a verb in the referring  
one (‘the one who Vs’) leads to a focus reading of the noun, similar  
to an English cleft.

At the same time, it is easy to understand why omnipredicativity is  
rare and why the concept is challenging. Reference is associated with  
words denoting “objects” and predication with words denoting “actions”  
(Croft 2001: 88), which is why most languages distinguish verbs and  
nouns also on the syntactic level. It has been suggested (Sasse 1993;  
2009) that omnipredicative systems can arise from the systematic use  
of oriented nominalizations (participles) as main-clause predicates,  
but that they are not very stable over time. This can result, for  
instance, in the functional decay of the determining element  
(Queixalós 2006).

Comparing omnipredicative languages is of typological interest because  
these languages often share traits that seem to be only indirectly  
associated with the syntactic flexibility of nouns and verbs. These  
include (but may not be restricted to):

•        predicate-initial clause structure
•        zero or optional argument indexation
•        lack of case marking
•        possessor-like encoding of one argument
•        restrictions on extractability

In order to figure out what the core of an omnipredicative system is  
and how much variation is possible within such a system, this workshop  
aims at bringing together experts on languages that can be analyzed as  
omnipredicative. Specific questions that contributions may address  
include (but are not restricted to) the following:

•        How are lexical categories distinguished?
•        Are nouns and verbs to 100% syntactically flexibility with  
semantic uniformity (i.e. can the content word in a DP always be  
paraphrased as a headless relative clause)?
•        Are semantic differences between the predicative and  
referential use systematic?
•        How does negation work, both of a main predicate and inside a DP?
•        If the language has a copula, when is it needed?
•        Does an omnipredicative analysis require a determiner?
•        Is there evidence of a pragmatic effect of “swapped” lexical  
categories?
•        How are equational sentences with a pronominal subject (of  
the type ‘She is/was an actress’) formed?
•        Along which diachronic pathways does the rise or decline of  
an omnipredicative system take place?

This workshop intends to explore to what degree omnipredicativity can  
be usefully considered a morphosyntactic type, and which would be the  
more central and the more marginal features of languages belonging to  
this type.

Abstract submission
We invite abstracts of up to 300 words (plus references), to be  
submitted in Word and PDF format to the workshop organizers by  
November 10, 2024:

Katharina Haude:         katharina.haude at cnrs.fr
Albert Alvarez:         aalvarez at lenext.uson.mx

The decision of acceptance of the workshop by the SLE committee will  
be published on December 10, 2024 (see  
https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2025/first-call-for-papers/).

References
Beck, David. 2013. Unidirectional exibility and the noun–verb  
distinction in Lushootseed. In Jan Rijkhoff & Eva Van Lier (eds.),  
Flexible Word Classes: Typological studies of underspecified parts of  
speech. Oxford: Oxford University Press.  
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199668441.001.0001.
Bisang, Walter. 2013. Word class systems between flexibility and  
rigidity: an integrative approach. In Jan Rijkhoff & Eva Van Lier  
(eds.), Flexible Word Classes: Typological studies of underspecified  
parts of speech, 275–303. Oxford: Oxford University Press.  
https://academic.oup.com/book/26032/chapter/193945430.
Croft, William. 2001. Radical Construction Grammar. Oxford: Oxford  
University Press.
Cruz, Aline da & Walkíria Neiva Praça. 2019. Innovation in  
nominalization in Tupí-Guaraní languages: A comparative analysis of  
Tupinambá, Apyãwa and Nheengatú. In Nominalization in Languages of the  
Americas (Typological Studies in Language 124), 625–655.  
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Evans, Nicholas & Toshiki Osada. 2005. Mundari: The myth of a language  
without word classes. Linguistic Typology 9(3). 351–390.  
https://doi.org/10.1515/lity.2005.9.3.351.
Hahn, Michael. 2014. Predication and NP structure in an  
omnipredicative language: The case of Khoekhoe. Proceedings of the  
International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar.  
https://doi.org/10.21248/hpsg.2014.13.
Haude, Katharina. 2019. From predication to reference: on “verbal DPs”  
in Movima. In Christine Bonnot, Outi Duvallon & Hélène de Penanros  
(eds.), Individuation et référence nominale à travers les langues,  
53–77. Paris: Editions Lambert-Lucas.  
https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01971969v1.
Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 1991. The Philippine Challenge to Universal  
Grammar (Arbeitspapier 15 (Neue Folge)). Institut für  
Sprachwissenschaft.
Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 2008. Lexical categories and voice in Tagalog.  
In Peter K. Austin & Simon Musgrave (eds.), Voice and Grammatical  
Functions in Austronesian Languages, 247–293. Stanford, CA: CSLI  
Publications.
Jelinek, Eloise & Richard A. Demers. 1994. Predicates and pronominal  
arguments in Straits Salish. Language 70(4). 697–736.  
https://doi.org/10.2307/416325.
Launey, Michel. 1994. Une grammaire omniprédicative: Essai sur la  
morphosyntaxe du nahuatl classique. Paris: CNRS Editions.
Launey, Michel. 2004. The features of omnipredicativity in Classical  
Nahuatl. STUF - Language Typology and Universals 57(1). 49–69.  
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1524/stuf.2004.57.1.49/html.
Queixalós, Francesc. 2006. The primacy and fate of predicativity in  
Tupi-Guaraní. In Ximena Lois & Valentina Vapnarsky (eds.), Root  
Classes and Lexical Categories in Amerindian Languages, 249–287.  
Vienna: Peter Lang.
Sasse, Hans-Jürgen. 1993. Syntactic Categories and Subcategories. In  
Joachim Jacobs, Armin von Stechow, Wolfgang Sterneveld & Theo  
Vennemann (eds.), Syntax. Ein internationales Handbuch  
zeitgenössischer Forschung / An International Handbook of Contemporary  
Research (Handbücher Zur Sprach- Und Kommunikationswissenschaft /  
Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science [HSK] 9), vol. 1,  
646–686. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Sasse, Hans-Jürgen. 2009. Nominalism in Austronesian: a historical  
typological perspective. Comments on Daniel Kaufman’s “Austronesian  
Nominalism and its consequences.” Theoretical Linguistics 35(1).  
167–181.
Vapnarsky, Valentina. 2013. Is Yucatec Maya an omnipredicative  
language? Predication, the copula and focus constructions. STUF -  
Language Typology and Universals 66(1).  
https://doi.org/10.1524/stuf.2013.0004.
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