Reminder: Workshops on Uralic syntax at CIFU-XII

[Johanna Laakso]

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Two joint workshops on the syntax of Uralic languages at the XII International Congress for Finno-Ugric Studies in Oulu, Finland, 17-21 August 2015.
Syntactic structure of Uralic languages

orsolyatan at gmail.com

The syntax of Samoyedic and Ob-Ugric languages

Organisers: Larisa Leisiö (Kone Foundation) and Irina Nikolaeva (SOAS, London), contact larisa.leisio at uta.fi

Despite the fact that there has been an increase in the number of studies and the amount of research on the syntax of Uralic languages in the past few years, syntactic phenomena in the small Uralic languages still remain understudied (e.g. the interaction between intonation, word order and information structure, syntactic function of possessors, etc). Based on recent papers on Uralic we can discover very close relations among some of the languages, very distant relations among others, but even the distant relatives still display common, family- specific characteristics. What are the common syntactic properties of the Uralic Languages? Can we talk about ‘Uralic syntax’? Can we say that these properties are further evidence of the Uralic languages belonging to one language family? Formal analyses of syntactic phenomena in Uralic languages may extend our knowledge of human language and may lead to a better understanding of the complex relationships among languages or language contact.

Workshop 1 aims to be a forum to present and discuss current issues concerning the syntax of Uralic languages based on any kind of theoretical approach. The purpose is to examine the Uralic languages both from a synchronic and from a diachronic perspective, and both within one language and cross-linguistically.

Workshop 2 focuses on the syntax of Samoyedic and Ob-Ugric languages. Spoken in Western and Central Siberia, the Ob-Ugric and Samoyedic languages are geographically close and demonstrate a number of common features at all levels of linguistic structure. It has even been suggested in the literature that at some stage they formed a kind of genetic grouping, a hypothetical Eastern Uralic, which was the first to diverge from the Uralic proto- language. The symposium will focus on the syntax of Ob-Ugric and Samoyedic languages with the aim of investigating the variations in their syntactic structure, the contact-induced phenomena in the domain of syntax, as well as the potential common genetic heritage.

We welcome contributions that either introduce the new data on the syntax of Uralic languages, or present a new theoretical analysis of the available data. The topics may include - constituent order
- argument structure and the syntactic properties of core arguments
- interaction between word order and information structure
- differential object marking
- possessive suffixes as definiteness markers
- predication in Uralic
- subject agreement in non-finite constructions
- valence-changing processes
- anaphora
- language contact inside and outside of the Uralic language family
- syntactic change in Uralic Languages


Organisers: Anders Holmberg (Newcastle University), Balazs Surányi (HAS-


RIL & Pázmány University), Orsolya Tánczos (HAS-RIL & Pázmány


University, contact

Selected papers may be published in the journal Finno-Ugric Languages and Linguistics.

Abstracts should be submitted by the deadline September 30 , 2014 via EasyChair system. See instructions at http://www.oulu.fi/suomenkieli/fuxii/abstraktit.. Abstracts should not exceed 500 words excluding possible examples and references. Notification of acceptance will be sent by the end of October, 2014. 
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