36.2711, Confs: Workshop at SLE 2026: Non-canonical Subjects: Emergence, Evolution and Conventionalization (Germany)

Fri Sep 12 12:05:02 UTC 2025

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-2711. Fri Sep 12 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.2711, Confs: Workshop at SLE 2026: Non-canonical Subjects: Emergence, Evolution and Conventionalization (Germany)

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Date: 11-Sep-2025
From: Pierre-Yves Modicom [pierre-yves.modicom at univ-lyon3.fr]
Subject: Workshop at SLE 2026: Non-canonical Subjects: Emergence, Evolution and Conventionalization

Workshop at SLE 2026: Non-canonical Subjects: Emergence, Evolution and
Conventionalization

Date: 26-Aug-2026 - 29-Aug-2026
Location: Osnabrück, Germany
Contact: Pierre-Yves Modicom
Contact Email: pierre-yves.modicom at univ-lyon3.fr
Meeting URL: https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2026/list-of-workshops/

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics

Submission Deadline: 15-Nov-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 diagnostics have been
successfully applied to several languages and have thus led to the
discovery of non-canonically case-marked subjects in Icelandic
(Andrews 1976, Thráinsson 1976, inter alia) and the South Asian
languages (Masica 1976, Kachru, Kachru & Bhatia 1976, inter alia).
Later, such nonnominative subjects were documented in additional
Modern 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). Further 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).
In addition, structures involving non-nominative subjects have been
found to exist in Japanese (Shibatani 1999), 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),
the Cariban languages (Castro Alves 2018) and the Tsezic languages
(Comrie, Forker & Khalilova (2020). The current workshop is devoted to
the emergence and subsequent evolution of nonnominative subjects, of
which, at least the first one, is a heavily under-researched area
(see, however, Barðdal & Eythórsson 2009, Pooth et al. 2019, Barðdal
2023: 140–152 and the references therein). In principle, there might
also be as many explanations for their emergence as there are types of
constructions involving non-nominative subjects. For some of the
relevant structures, like oblique anticausatives or alternating
Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat verbs, there certainly exist viable hypotheses of
their emergence in the Indo-European languages (cf. Barðdal et al.
2020 on oblique anticausatives and Barðdal 2025 on the alternation
between Dat-Nom and Nom-Dat), although this is far from true for the
majority of the relevant types, nor is it true for languages outside
the Indo-European family. We thus particularly welcome contributions
focusing on this issue in or across different and diverse languages
around the world. This also includes the issue of whether the
emergence of the category of non-nominative subjects in a language is
tied to specific alignment systems.
Another topic of great interest relates to the place of non-canonical
subjects within their respective language system. That is, do these
form a residual or epiphenomenal set of phenomena, or do they belong
to the core system, as for instance in Classical Latin or Greek? This
is a particularly pertinent question as emergent work on Modern Dutch
even suggests that oblique subjecthood may be maintained in non-case
languages (cf. Somers 2023).
Furthermore, how can we decide between two options, i.e. of belonging
to the core of grammar or being residual? Should productivity be
invoked to evaluate the synchronic status of noncanonical subjects? Or
should we apply syntactic tests such as deletion, raising or reflexive
binding to determine whether predicates with non-canonical subjects
are formally frozen or not? And how do non-canonical subjects relate
to voice phenomena and differential argument marking in their
respective languages (cf. Barðdal et al. 2020)?
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 emergence of the category of non-canonical subjects in
different types of alignment systems. Reanalysis, grammaticalization,
productivity systematic alternations of non-nominative subjects and
other structures like oblique anticausativization (Barðdal et al.
2020) and alternating Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat and Acc-Nom/ Nom-Acc predicates
(cf. Barðdal 2023, Cluyse, Somers & Barðdal 2025, Ilioaia, Van
Peteghem & Barðdal 2025, Somers et al. 2025, inter alia), which may
contribute to our knowledge of how non-nominative subjects may arise
 - the mechanisms behind their maintenance, evolution or loss (e.g.
“dative sickness”, “accusative sickness” and “nominative sickness” in
languages with accusative alignment, cf. Eythórsson 2002, Barðdal
2011, Dunn et al. 2017, Danesi 2017, Dewey & Carey 2018)
 - the place of non-canonical subjects within their respective
language system: do they form a residual or epiphenomenal set of
phenomena, or do they belong to the core system?
Please submit your abstract of one page, excluding references, to
pierre-yves.modicom (AT) univ-lyon3.fr before November 15th, 2025.
Full CfP with bibliography:
https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2026/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/2025/09/SLE2026_Non-canonical-subjects.pdf

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