36.1210, Confs: The typology of non-canonical subjects (ALT 2026 Workshop Proposal) (France)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-1210. Sat Apr 12 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.1210, Confs: The typology of non-canonical subjects (ALT 2026 Workshop Proposal) (France)

Moderator: Steven Moran (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Justin Fuller
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Steven Franks, Joel Jenkins, Daniel Swanson, Erin Steitz
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Editor for this issue: Erin Steitz <ensteitz at linguistlist.org>

================================================================


Date: 08-Apr-2025
From: Pierre-Yves Modicom [pierre-yves.modicom at univ-lyon3.fr]
Subject: The typology of non-canonical subjects (ALT 2026 Workshop Proposal)


The typology of non-canonical subjects (ALT 2026 Workshop Proposal)

Date: 01-Jul-2026 - 03-Jul-2026
Location: Lyon, France
Contact: Pierre-Yves Modicom
Contact Email: pierre-yves.modicom at univ-lyon3.fr

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics

Submission Deadline: 27-Apr-2025

The typology of non-canonical subjects (ALT 2026, Lyon)
Convenors: Pierre-Yves Modicom, Joren Somers & Jóhanna Barðdal
Please submit your abstract of one page, excluding references, to
pierre-yves.modicom (AT) univ-lyon3.fr before April 26th, 2025.
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:
 - the 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
References and full call:
https://minimamodalia.wordpress.com/non-canonical-subjects-2026/



------------------------------------------------------------------------------

********************** LINGUIST List Support ***********************
Please consider donating to the Linguist List to support the student editors:

https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=87C2AXTVC4PP8

LINGUIST List is supported by the following publishers:

Bloomsbury Publishing http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/

Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics

Cascadilla Press http://www.cascadilla.com/

De Gruyter Mouton https://cloud.newsletter.degruyter.com/mouton

Edinburgh University Press http://www.edinburghuniversitypress.com

Elsevier Ltd http://www.elsevier.com/linguistics

John Benjamins http://www.benjamins.com/

Language Science Press http://langsci-press.org

Lincom GmbH https://lincom-shop.eu/

Multilingual Matters http://www.multilingual-matters.com/

Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT) http://www.lotpublications.nl/

Oxford University Press http://www.oup.com/us

Wiley http://www.wiley.com


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-36-1210
----------------------------------------------------------