[Lingtyp] CfP Workshop proposal on "The typology of non-canonical subjects" (convenors : Modicom / Barðal / Somers) ALT2026 Lyon, 1-3 July 2026

Tue Apr 8 17:55:26 UTC 2025

Dear colleagues,

We (Pierre-Yves Modicom, Jóhanna Bardðal, Joren Somers) would like to 
submit a workshop proposal on "The typology of non-canonical subjects" 
to the ALT 2026 organizing committee (Lyon, France, July 1-3, 2026). In 
attachment and below, you will find the call for proposals.

Please submit your abstract of one page, excluding references, to 
*pierre-yves.modicom at univ-lyon3.fr* before *April 26th, 2025*.

All the best

Pierre-Yves (on behalf)

++++

*The typology of non-canonical subjects*

Workshop proposal for ALT 2026, Lyon

convenors: Pierre-Yves Modicom, Joren Somers & Jóhanna Barðdal

At least since Keenan (1976), prototypical subjects have been defined in 
terms of coding and behavioral properties, such as case marking, 
clause-initial position, subject-verb inversion, conjunction reduction, 
raising, and control. These have been successfully applied to several 
languages and have thus led to the discovery of non-canonically 
case-marked subjects, starting with Icelandic (Andrews 1976, Thráinsson 
1976, inter alia) and the South Asian languages (Masica 1976, Kachru, 
Kachru & Bhatia 1976, inter alia). Later, such non-nominative subjects 
have been documented in additional Germanic languages like Faroese 
(Barnes 1986) and German (Barðdal 2006, Somers et al. 2025, inter alia), 
alongside a substantial body of work on the early Germanic languages, 
like Gothic, Old English, Old Saxon, Old Norse-Icelandic and Middle High 
German (cf. Barðdal 2023 and the references therein).

Additional Indo-European languages featuring non-nominative subjects are 
Russian (Moore & Perlmutter 2000), Old French (Mathieu 2006), Romanian 
(Ilioaia 2023), and Latin and Ancient Greek (Barðdal et al. 2023, 
Cluyse, Somers & Barðdal 2025). Non-nominative subjects have also been 
documented in further languages around the globe, such as Japanese 
(Shibatani 1999) and Korean (Yoon 2004), Hebrew (Landau 2009, Pat-El 
2018), native American languages (Hermon 1985), the Dravidian languages 
(Verma & Mohanan 1990), the Dardic languages (Steever 1998), the 
Tibeto-Burman languages (Bickel 2004) and the Cariban languages (Castro 
Alves 2018).

Today, 50 years after Keenan’s monumental work, the aim of this workshop 
is to once more bring non-nominative subjects to the fore and to 
specifically focus on:

  *

    a cross-linguistic typology of subjects

  *

    the status of subject criteria in language comparison

  *

    theories of argument structure and valency, e.g. lexical vs.
    non-lexical theories of argument structure constructions

  *

    the mapping between semantic roles, information status and syntactic
    coding of subject arguments

  *

    the similarities and differences between phenomena such as
    differential subject marking and split alignment across languages

The workshop is also open to any typological contribution to the 
following issues:

  *

    the semantic motivation behind i) non-canonical case marking of
    subjects, ii) valency alternation in the selection of subject
    arguments iii) split alignment or iv) differential subject marking

  *

    non-canonical subjects in languages with alignment systems other
    than nominative–accusative

  *

    syntactic alternations involving non-nominative subjects, like
    oblique anticausativization (cf. Barðdal et al. 2020)

  *

    alternating Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat or Acc-Nom/Nom-Acc predicates

  *

    non-canonically case-marked subjects in non-case languages, like
    Dutch (cf. Somers 2023)

  *

    morphological variation in subject case marking

  *

    the emergence, evolution and loss of non-canonical subjects in
    language history

Please submit your abstract of one page, excluding references, to 
pierre-yves.modicom (AT) univ-lyon3.fr before April 26th, 2025.

References

Allen, Cynthia L. 1995. Case marking and reanalysis: Grammatical 
relations from Old to Early Modern English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Andrews, Avery D. 1976. The VP complement analysis in Modern 
Icelandic.North Eastern Linguistic Society6. 1–21.

Barðdal, Jóhanna. 2006. Construction-specific properties of syntactic 
subjects in Icelandic and German. Cognitive Linguistics17(1). 39–106.

Barðdal, Jóhanna. 2023. Oblique subjects in Germanic: Their status, 
history and reconstruction. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Barðdal, Jóhanna, Eleonora Cattafi, Serena Danesi, Laura Bruno & 
Leonardo Biondo. 2023. 
<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336146514_Non-Nominative_Subjects_in_Latin_and_Ancient_Greek_Applying_the_Subject_Tests_on_Early_Indo-European_Material>Non-nominative 
subjects in Latin and Ancient Greek: Applying the subject tests on Early 
Indo-European languages. Indogermanische Forschungen128: 321–392.

Barðdal, Jóhanna, Leonid Kulikov, Roland Pooth & Peter Alexander 
Kerkhof. 2020. Oblique anticausatives: A morphosyntactic isogloss in 
Indo-European. Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics56(3): 413–449.

Barnes, Michael. 1986. Subject, nominative and oblique case in Faroese. 
Scripta Islandica38: 3–35.

Bickel, Balthasar. 2004. The syntax of experiencers in the Himalayas. In 
Peri Bhaskararao & Karumuri V. Subbarao (eds.), Non-Nominative Subjects 
I, 77–111. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Castro Alves, Flavia de. 2018. Sujeito dativo em Canela [Dative subjects 
in Canela]. Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi: Ciências 
Humanas13(2). 377–403.

Cluyse, Brian, Joren Somers & Jóhanna Barðdal. 2025.Latin placēre as an 
alternating Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat verb: A radically new analysis 
<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/378521771_Latin_placere_as_an_alternating_Dat-NomNom-Dat_verb_A_radically_new_analysis>. 
Indogermanische Forschungen130 (in press).

Hermon, Gabriella. 1985. Syntactic Modularity. Dordrecht: Foris.

Ilioaia, Mihaela. 2023. MIHI EST construction: An instance of 
non-canonical subject marking in Romanian. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Kachru, Yamuna, Braj B. Kachru & Tej K. Bhatia. 1976. The notion 
'Subject': A note on Hindi-Urdu, Kashmiri and Punjabi. The Notion of 
Subject in South Asian Languages, ed. by M. K. Verma. Madison: 
University of Wisconsin.

Keenan, Edward L. 1976. Towards a universal definition of subject. In 
Charles N. Li (ed.), Subject and Topic, 303–333. New York: Academic Press.

Landau, Idan. 2009. The locative syntax of experiencers. Cambridge, MA: 
MIT Press.

Masica, Colin P. 1976. Defining a linguistic area: South Asia. Chicago: 
University of Chicago Press.

Mathieu, Eric. 2006. Quirky subjects in Old French. Studia 
Linguistica60(3): 282–312.

Moore, John & David M. Perlmutter. 2000. What Does it Take to Be a 
Dative Subject? Natural Language and Linguistic Theory18: 373–416.

Pat-El, Na’ama. 2018. The diachrony of non-canonical subjects in 
Northwest Semitic. Non-canonical subjects: The 
Reykjavík-Eyjafjallajökull papers, ed. by Jóhanna Barðdal, Na’ama Pat-El 
& Stephen Mark Carey, 159–184. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Shibatani, Masayoshi. 1999. Dative Subject Constructions Twenty-Two 
Years Later. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences29(2): 45–76.

Somers, Joren. 2023. Oblieke subjecten in het Nederlands? De casus 
‘wachten’. Nederlandse Taalkunde28(3): 350–364.

Somers, Joren, Torsten Leuschner, Ludovic De Cuypere & Jóhanna 
Barðdal.<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/375182960_A_corpus-based_analysis_of_the_Dat-NomNom-Dat_alternation_in_German>2025. 
A Corpus-based analysis of the Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat alternation in German. 
Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft44 (in press).

Steever, Sanford B. (ed.). 1998. The Dravidian Languages. London: Routledge.

Thráinsson, Höskuldur. 1979. On Complementation in Icelandic. New York: 
Garland.

Verma, M. K. & K. P. Mohanan (eds.). 1990. Experiencer Subjects in South 
Asian Languages. Stanford: CSLI Publications.

Yoon, James H. 2004. Non-nominative (major) subjects and case stacking 
in Korean. Non-Nominative Subjects 2,ed. by Peri Bhaskararao & Karumuri 
Venkata Subbarao, 265–314. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

-- 
Page:https://minimamodalia.wordpress.com
Editor-in-chief, ELAD-SILDA:https://publications-prairial.fr/elad-silda/

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