35.2900, Calls: 58th SLE Workshop - Omnipredicativity: its core and its fringes

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-35-2900. Sat Oct 19 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.2900, Calls: 58th SLE Workshop - Omnipredicativity: its core and its fringes

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Date: 17-Oct-2024
From: Katharina Haude [katharina.haude at cnrs.fr]
Subject: 58th SLE Workshop - Omnipredicativity: its core and its fringes


Full Title: 58th SLE Workshop - Omnipredicativity: its core and its
fringes

Date: 26-Aug-2025 - 29-Aug-2025
Location: Bordeaux, France
Contact Person: Katharina Haude
Meeting Email: katharina.haude at cnrs.fr

Linguistic Field(s): Pragmatics; Syntax; Typology

Call Deadline: 10-Nov-2024

Meeting Description:

This is a proposal for a workshop to be held as part of the 58th SLE
conference.

Call for Papers:

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).
Omnipredicativity has sometimes been understood in the literature as
implying that a language lacks lexical categories or that all its
content words are verbs. 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. 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 tThis 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. We invite abstracts of up to 300 words (plus references),
to be submitted in Word and PDF format to the workshop organizers,
Katharina Haude (katharina.haude at cnrs.fr) and Albert Alvarez
(aalvarez at lenext.uson.mx).



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