22.3447, Calls: Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, Typology, Historical Ling/Iceland

Thu Sep 1 12:33:00 UTC 2011

LINGUIST List: Vol-22-3447. Thu Sep 01 2011. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 22.3447, Calls: Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, Typology, Historical Ling/Iceland

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1)
Date: 30-Aug-2011
From: Jóhanna Barðdal [Johanna.barddal at uib.no]
Subject: Non-Canonically Case-Marked Subjects within and across Languages and Language Families: Stability, Variation and Change

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thu, 01 Sep 2011 08:30:50
From: Jóhanna Barðdal [Johanna.barddal at uib.no]
Subject: Non-Canonically Case-Marked Subjects within and across Languages and Language Families: Stability, Variation and Change

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Full Title: Non-Canonically Case-Marked Subjects within and across Languages and Language Families: Stability, Variation and Change 
Short Title: SubjectCase 

Date: 04-Jun-2012 - 08-Jun-2012
Location: Reykjavík, Iceland 
Contact Person: Tonya Kim Dewey
Meeting Email: SubjectCase at gmail.com
Web Site: http://org.uib.no/iecastp/IECASTP/SubjectCase.htm 

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Morphology; Semantics; Syntax; Typology 

Call Deadline: 15-Nov-2011 

Meeting Description:

In collaboration with the Institute of Linguistics at the University of Iceland, the IECASTP/NonCanCase project at the University of Bergen organizes a conference on 'Non-Canonically Case-Marked Subjects within and across Languages and Language Families: Stability, Variation and Change'.

Invited Speakers:

Miriam Butt (University of Constance)
Thórhallur Eythórsson (University of Iceland)
Julie Ann Legate (University of Pennsylvania)
Andrej Malchukov (Max Planck Institute, Leipzig)

Location: Reykjavík and Hótel Hekla (near Eyjafjallajökull)

Oblique, 'quirk', or non-canonically case-marked subjects have been the focus of enormous interest and massive research ever since Andrews (1976) and Masica (1976). Early on, research in this area was mainly carried out within the generative tradition, but by now interest in oblique subjects has spread to all other frameworks (cf. papers in Aikhenvald, Dixon & Onishi 2001, Bhaskararao & Subbarao 2004, and Malchukov & Spencer 2009). The attention has generally been on the syntactic behavior of oblique subjects, such as their ability to be left unexpressed in conjoined clauses and control infinitives, their ability to figure in object and subject raising, and to control reflexives, as well as on their word order properties (e.g. Sigurðsson 1991). Nevertheless, the validity of certain tests for subjecthood remains controversial, especially in diachronic studies (e.g. Eythórsson & Barðdal 2005). 

Recent research has increasingly turned to the semantics of oblique subjects, both within individual languages and within language families. Barðdal et. al (2011), for instance, show that there is a host of lexical-semantic verb classes associated with oblique subjects in several of the ancient/archaic Indo-European languages, ranging from experiencer, cognition, perception, and attitudinal predicates, to all kinds of happenstance predicates and predicates denoting purely relational and ontological states. Oblique subjects may also denote possession, modality and evidentiality, as well as featuring in the intransitive variant of causative pairs (anticausatives) in some Indo-European languages (e.g. Cennamo, Eythórsson & Barðdal 2011). In a wider typological perspective, it remains to be established which semantic features are language-family-specific and which are generally found cross-linguistically. 

Given the central role that Icelandic has played in research on oblique subjects (witness the classic paper by Zaenen, Maling & Thráinsson 1985), Iceland is the obvious location for this conference. The conference will start in Reykjavík, followed by a one-day tour in Southern Iceland, visiting Thingvellir, Geysir, Gullfoss and other places of great natural beauty and historical interest. The concluding part of the conference will take place at Hótel Hekla, a charming country hotel about 70 km east of the capital, Reykjavík, with a marvelous view of (in)famous volcanoes such as Hekla and Eyjafjallajökull. 

Call for Papers:

We welcome contributions focusing on a specific language, language family or cross-linguistic comparison, from different theoretical frameworks, on all aspects of oblique subjects, synchronic, diachronic and typological, including the following:

- The semantics of the oblique subject construction, for instance in terms of lexical semantics, within a single language, or in a comparative or a typological perspective
- The syntactic behavior of oblique subjects within a language, a language family, or across languages
- The validity of particular tests for subjecthood, both in modern languages as well as corpus languages (e.g. the older Indo-European languages)
- The dichotomy between oblique subjects and subject-like obliques which pass some, but perhaps not all, of the subject tests, and its practical and theoretical implications
- The origin and emergence of non-canonical subject case marking
- The potential role of oblique anticausatives in the emergence of oblique subjects
- The syntax and semantics of oblique subjects in non-Indo-European languages 

Please submit your abstracts of 500 words or less through http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=subjectcase2012, no later than November 15th, 2011. A response on abstracts will be sent out on December 15th, 2011.

References:

- Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y., R.M.W. Dixon & M. Onishi (eds.). 2001. Non-Canonical Marking of Subjects and Objects. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Andrews, Avery D. 1976. The VP Complement Analysis in Modern Icelandic. North Eastern Linguistic Society 6:1-21.
- Barðdal, Jóhanna, Valgerður Bjarnadóttir, Eystein Dahl, Gard B. Jenset & Thomas Smitherman. 2011. Reconstructing Constructional Semantics: The Dative Subject Construction in Old Norse-Icelandic, Latin, Ancient Greek, Old Russian and Lithuanian. Submitted to a thematic volume in Studies in Language, entitled 'Theory and Data in Cognitive Linguistics', Nikolas Gisborne & Willem Hollmann (eds).
- Bhaskararao, Peri & K. V. Subbarao (eds.) 2004. Non-Nominative Subjects. (2 vols.) (Typological studies in language 60 - 61.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Cennamo, Michela, Thórhallur Eythórsson & Jóhanna Barðdal. 2011. The Rise and Fall of Anticausative Constructions in Indo-European: The Context of Latin and Germanic. Submitted to a thematic volume in Linguistics, entitled 'Typology of Labile Verbs: Focus on Diachrony', Leonid Kulikov & Nikolaos Lavidas (eds).
- Eythórsson, Thórhallur & Jóhanna Barðdal. 2005. Oblique Subjects: A Common Germanic Inheritance. Language 81(4):824-81.
- Malchukov, Andrej & Andrew Spencer (eds.). 2009. In The Oxford Handbook of Case. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Masica, Colin P. 1976. Defining a Linguistic Area: South Asia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Sigurðsson, Halldór Ármann. 1991. Icelandic Case-Marked PRO and the Licensing of Lexical Arguments. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 9:327-362.
- Zaenen, Annie, Joan Maling & Höskuldur Thráinsson. 1985. Case and Grammatical Functions: The Icelandic Passive. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 3: 441-483.

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