33.2893, Calls: Syntax/Greece

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-33-2893. Sat Sep 24 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.2893, Calls: Syntax/Greece

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Date: Sat, 24 Sep 2022 06:42:19
From: Hannah Booth [hannah.booth at ugent.be]
Subject: SLE workshop: Expletives at the syntax-discourse interface

 
Full Title: SLE workshop: Expletives at the syntax-discourse interface 

Date: 29-Aug-2023 - 01-Sep-2023
Location: National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece 
Contact Person: Hannah Booth
Meeting Email: hannah.booth at ugent.be

Linguistic Field(s): Syntax 

Call Deadline: 01-Nov-2022 

Meeting Description:

Expletives have been central in the development of many theories of grammar,
as semantically vacuous elements which can reveal crucial insights about
syntactic structure. The classic research in this area has focussed on
expletives which show subject-like behaviour and in particular their relation
to various morphosyntactic parameters, both synchronically and diachronically
(e.g. Haiman 1971; Rizzi 1986; Faarlund 1990; Falk 1993; Vikner 1995).
However, our established understanding of expletives as exclusively structural
fillers for argument slots is challenged by the fact that many
expletive(-like) elements crosslinguistically are conditioned by
discourse-related factors. Relevant examples have been observed, for instance,
in Romance varieties (Sornicola 1996; Carrilho 2008; Hinzelin 2009; Ledgeway
2010; Gupton & Lowman 2013; Corr 2017), Icelandic (Zaenen 1983; Rögnvaldsson
1983; Sells 2005), West Flemish (Haegeman et al. 2017), Finnish (Kaiser 2019),
Russian (Pekelis 2019), and Somali (Svolacchia et al. 1995; Mereu 2009;
Frascarelli 2010).

Moreover, some of the classic expletive subjects have been characterised in
terms of their contribution to discourse by certain authors, in connection
with the fact that such elements are generally restricted to thetic clauses,
e.g. Bennis (1986) on Dutch ''er'', and Ward & Birner (1995) and Sluckin
(2021) on English ''there''. In addition, a long-standing tradition within
Germanic distinguishes between expletive subjects and “expletive topics” (e.g.
Faarlund 1990). However, although the term “expletive topic'' implies a
connection to discourse, such elements have typically been treated on
exclusively structural terms, as fillers to satisfy verb-second (Haiman 1971;
Thráinsson 1979; Lenerz 1985), although more discourse-oriented approaches
have also been proposed (Sells 2005; Booth et al. 2017; Fuß & Hinterhölzl
2021).

Despite increasing empirical evidence for discourse-related expletives, our
theoretical, typological and diachronic understanding of them is still
unsatisfactory. This workshop aims to bring together researchers working on
different language families from diverse theoretical perspectives and areas of
linguistics to explore the insights which discourse-related expletives offer
in terms of the status of expletives as a category, and the nature of the
syntax-discourse interface. In particular, we are interested in questions such
as:

1) What can discourse-related expletives tell us generally about the nature of
the syntax-discourse interface and about how this should be theoretically
modelled?
2) To what extent can expletive elements be considered to contribute
discourse-related information, and how does this impact upon our traditional
understanding of expletives?
3) How should one synchronically distinguish discourse-related expletives from
“discourse markers”, and how are the two related diachronically?
4) How do discourse-related factors play a role in the diachronic development
of expletives?
5) What do discourse-related expletives tell us with respect to how expletives
are licensed? Are expletives exclusively structurally licensed, as
traditionally assumed, or can they be licensed via functional and pragmatic
mechanisms?
6) Given that many discourse-related expletives have been observed to be
optional, how can this be reconciled with the traditional view of expletives
as obligatory structural fillers?
7) What precise contribution to the discourse do “expletive topics” make, and
how does this interact with subjecthood given that topicality and subjecthood
often coincide?
8) How do discourse-related expletives interact with the null-subject
parameter?
9) To what extent do discourse-related expletives occur in those languages
which have been labelled as “discourse-configurational” (Kiss 1995)?


Call for Papers:

The workshop is planned as part of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Societas
Linguistica Europaea. We welcome both empirical and theoretical contributions,
as well as contributions which combine the two. 

Please send provisional abstracts of no more than 300 words (excluding
references) in PDF format by 1 November 2022 to:
hannah.booth at ugent.be and kim.groothuis at ugent.be

If the workshop is approved, authors must submit revised 500-word abstracts
according to the SLE guidelines before 15 January 2023.

References:
Bennis, H. 1986. Gaps and dummies. AUP.
Booth, H, et al. 2017. Dative subjects and the rise of positional licensing in
Icelandic. In M. Butt & T. H. King (eds.), LFG’17 Proceedings, 104–24.
Carrilho, E. 2008. Beyond doubling: overt expletives in European Portuguese
dialects. In S. Barbiers et al. (ed.), Microvariation in syntactic doubling,
301–49. Brill.
Corr, A. 2017. The grammaticalization of epistemicity in Ibero-Romance: alike
processes, unlike outcomes. Journal of Historical Linguistics 7(1). 48–76.
Faarlund, J. T. 1990. Syntactic change: Toward a theory of historical syntax.
de Gruyter.
Falk, C. 1993. Non-referential subjects and agreement in the history of
Swedish. Lingua 89(2-3). 143–80.
Frascarelli, M. 2010. Scope marking and focus in Somali. Linguistic Variation
Yearbook 10(1). 78–116.
Fuß, E. & R. Hinterhölzl. 2021. On the historical development of pronouns
referring to situations: the case of so-called ‘expletives’ in Germanic. Paper
presented at 22nd DiGS, May 2021.
Gupton, T. & S. Lowman. 2013. An F projection in Cibeño Dominican Spanish.
Proceedings of the 16th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, 338–48.
Haegeman, L, et al. 2017. Expletives and speaker-related meaning. In M.
Sheehan & L. R. Bailey (eds.), Order and structure in syntax II, 69–93. LSP.
Haiman, J. 1971. Targets and syntactic change. Mouton.
Hinzelin, M.-O. 2009. Neuter pronouns in Ibero-Romance: Discourse reference,
expletives and beyond. In G.A. Kaiser & E.-M. Remberger (eds.),
“Null-subjects, expletives, and locatives in Romance”, 1–25.
Kaiser, E.. 2019. Word order patterns in generic ‘zero person’ constructions
in Finnish: Insights from speech-act participants. LSA Proceedings 4(1).
53-115.
Kiss, K. É. (ed.). 1995. Discourse configurational languages. OUP.
Ledgeway, A N. 2010. Subject licensing in CP: the Neapolitan double-subject
Construction. In P. Benincà & N. Munaro (eds.), Mapping the left periphery,
257–96. OUP.
Lenerz, J. 1985. Zur Theorie syntaktischen Wandels: das expletive es in der
Geschichte des Deutschen. In W. Abraham (ed.), Erklärende Syntax des
Deutschen, 99–136. Narr.
Mereu, L. 2009. Universals of information structure. In L. Mereu (ed.),
Information structure and its interfaces, 75–104. de Gruyter.
Pekelis, O. E. 2019. Expletives in a null subject language and criteria for
expletiveness: evidence from Russian. Studies in Polish Linguistics 1.
189–205.
Rizzi, L. 1986. Null objects in Italian and the theory of pro. LI 17(3).
501-57.
Rögnvaldsson, E. 1983. Icelandic word order and það-insertion. WPSS 8. 1-21.
Sells, P. 2005. The peripherality of the Icelandic expletive. In M. Butt & T.
H. King (eds.), LFG’05 Proceedings, 408-28.
Sluckin, B. 2021. Non-canonical subjects and subject positions: locative
inversion, V2-violations, and feature inheritance. Humboldt University
dissertation.
Sornicola, R. 1996. Alcune strutture con pronome espletivo nei dialetti
italiani meridionali. In P. Benincà et al. (eds.), Italiano e dialetti nel
tempo, 323–340. Bulzoni.
Svolacchia M. et al. 1995. Aspects of discourse configurationality in Somali.
In Kiss (1995), 65–98. 
Thráinsson, H. 1979. On Complementation in Icelandic. Garland.
Vikner, S. 1995. Verb movement and expletive subjects in the Germanic
languages. OUP.
Ward, G. & B. Birner. 1995. Definiteness and the English existential. Language
722–742.
Zaenen, A. 1983. On syntactic binding. LI 14(3). 469–504




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