35.1638, Calls: BCGL 17: Categories & Categorization

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-35-1638. Mon Jun 03 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.1638, Calls: BCGL 17: Categories & Categorization

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Date: 25-May-2024
From: Jeroen Van Craenenbroeck [jeroen.vancraenenbroeck at kuleuven.be]
Subject: BCGL 17: Categories & Categorization


Full Title: BCGL 17: Categories & Categorization
Short Title: BCGL 17

Date: 12-Dec-2024 - 13-Dec-2024
Location: Brussels, Belgium
Contact Person: Jeroen Van Craenenbroeck
Meeting Email: jeroen.vancraenenbroeck at kuleuven.be
Web Site: https://www.crissp.be/bcgl-17-categories-categorization/

Linguistic Field(s): Morphology; Syntax

Call Deadline: 15-Aug-2024

Meeting Description:

CRISSP is proud to present the seventeenth installment of the Brussels
Conference on Generative Linguistics (BCGL), devoted to categories and
categorization.

BCGL 17: Categories & categorization
Brussels, December 12–13, 2024

We are pleased to announce that the following invited speakers have
agreed to give a talk at BCGL 17:

Luke Adamson (Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft)
Laura Grestenberger (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Bartosz Wiland (Adam Mickiewicz University)

1st Call for Papers:

The Center for Research in Syntax, Semantics, and Phonology (CRISSP)
of KU Leuven invites abstracts for the 17th edition of the Brussels
Conference on Generative Linguistics (BCGL 17), to be held on 12–13
December 2024. The conference will take place in Brussels and the
theme of BCGL 17 is Categories & categorization.

At an intuitive level, lexical categories like noun, verb, or
adjective seem like they should belong to the very core of any theory
of natural language. As is well‐known, however, this naive conception
has been a lively topic of debate—and dispute—since the early days of
generative grammar: lexical categories have been argued to be derived
notions that need to be further decomposed into smaller primitives
(see Chomsky 1970 and the ensuing tradition), the boundaries between
the various categories have been argued to be ‘fuzzy’, not sharp (see
Ross 1972, 1974), not all categories are thought to be created equal
(see e.g. Borer 2013:371–378), with some possibly derived from others
(see e.g. Amritavalli and Jayaseelan 2003, Kayne 2008). Meanwhile, in
the typological literature, the very universality of categories like
‘noun’ or ‘verb’ is frequently called into question (Bloomfield 1933,
Evans and Levinson 2008, Rijkhoff and van Lier 2013, Haspelmath 2020).
Needless to say, these issues multiply as soon as we also include
‘less canonical’ word classes such as adverbs or prepositions into the
discussion, or when we consider diachronic developments related to
word classes—like the development of adjectives and adpositions from
verbs or nouns—and the ‘intermediate’ positions these developments can
halt or pause at (Corver and van Riemsdijk 2013, Song 2019,
Cavirani‐Pots 2020).

Closely related to these topics is the matter of the
lexical‐functional divide. If lexical categories are split up into
categorizing heads and lexical roots, then the role of categorization
is taken over by formal features and functional projections. This
raises the question of whether we should make a distinction between
those functional heads that are specialized for categorization (cf.
‘little x’‐heads in Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993) or
C‐functors in Borer (2013)) and ‘regular’ ones. And what role is left
for the purely lexicalconceptual and/or phonological—material? Are
there categoryless, syntactically inactive roots present in the
syntactic derivation (Harley 2014, Borer 2013) or not (Ramchand 2008,
Starke 2009, Aronoff 2013)? Are (some) derivational affixes roots (De
Belder 2011, Lowenstamm 2014, Creemers et al. 2018)?

BCGL17 welcomes presentations that address these and related topics.
They include, but are not limited to, questions such as the following:
 - Are categories primitives of the grammar? If so, what are these
primitives? If not, how should they be decomposed? What categorial
features are there? Which categories or features—if any—are universal?
 - What is the relation between (the functional sequence dominating)
the different lexical categories? Are they independent, or do they
(partly or wholly) overlap? What, if anything, distinguishes the
lexical and functional lexicon in formal and/or featural terms?
 - Do categorial heads exist? If so, how many types and how many
flavours need to be distinguished? What is the status of derivational
morphology? And what is the status of morphological conversion or
zeroderivation: does it show that some categories contain others? If
so, how?
 - Do roots exist? If so, are they acategorial or do they bear
category information?



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