Date: 08-Mar-2010
From: Michelle Sheehan <michelle.sheehan ncl.ac.uk>
Subject: Special Session at the LAGB: (Dis)harmony in Nominals
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Full Title: Special Session at the LAGB: (Dis)harmony in Nominals
Date: 01-Sep-2010 - 04-Sep-2010
Location: Leeds, United Kingdom
Contact Person: Theresa Biberauer
Meeting Email: mtb23cam.ac.uk
Web Site: http://research.ncl.ac.uk/linearization/events.php
Linguistic Field(s): Linguistic Theories; Morphology; Syntax; Typology
Call Deadline: 28-Mar-2010
Meeting Description:
We invite abstracts for a proposed special session at the Linguistics
Association of Great Britain Annual Meeting to be held in Leeds, 1-4 September
2010.
The topic of the special session is (Dis)harmony in nominals. Papers are invited
on the ordering of constituents in the DP, with special reference to:
Call for Papers
The notions of 'harmony' and 'disharmony' (cf. i.a. Greenberg 1963, Hawkins
1983, Dryer 1992, 2009) are most commonly cited in connection with the relations
between different types of clausal elements. Thus, for instance, the
prototypical example of a 'harmonic' structure is one in which the position of
the verb and the object (preceding or following) is mirrored in the positioning
of adpositions and auxiliaries relative to their nominal and verbal complements.
Similarly, Dryer (1992) established the notion of 'verb
patterners' and 'object patterners'. In this special session, our focus will,
instead, be on harmonic and disharmonic patterns within nominal structures.
In light of the oft-cited parallels between clausal and nominal structure (cf.
Julien 2005 and Alexiadou, Haegeman & Stavrou 2007 for recent discussion), an
initial question that arises is the extent to which nominals exhibit harmonies
and disharmonies parallel to what we find in the clausal domain. Careful
empirical work by Cinque (2005) has recently highlighted the fact that we can
distinguish preferred, dispreferred and unattested structures in the nominal
domain, with demonstratives, numerals and adjectives crosslinguistically being
subject to specific positional constraints. Holmberg (2000), likewise, points to
a nominal structure, involving a head-final structure dominating a head-initial
one, which is curiously barred in Finnish, despite the availability of the other
permutations; this pattern mirrors one which is also evident in a range of
clausal contexts (cf. various recent papers by Biberauer, Holmberg, Roberts and
Sheehan). Similarly, we find that nominal particles appear to surface in both
harmonic and disharmonic configurations, raising the question of the extent to
which these behave like their clausal counterparts (consider, for example, the
much-discussed Sinitic final force particles and the final particles surfacing
in northern Italian varieties, despite the fact that these
systems are head-initial in the clausal domain). More generally, we are also
interested in questions such as:
- the structure of and constraints on nominal-internal "grafts" in the
sense of van Riemsdijk (1998) - cf. a far from simple matter
- the nature of the so-called Head-Final Filter (cf. Williams 1982; cf. also
Emonds 1976), in terms of which many, but not all languages bar structures
equivalent to the proud of their results students
- the extent to which contact languages (e.g. creoles) permit
crosslinguistically rare nominal structures (cf. Haddican 2002 for discussion of
one such structure)
- final 'particles' in otherwise head-initial DPs
Please send 1-page abstracts, formatted in accordance with the LAGB's guidelines
(see the Call for Papers section of the First Circular, available on-line as:
http://www.lagb.org.uk/circulars/2010_1leedscirc.pdf), to Theresa Biberauer
(mtb23cam.ac.uk) by Sunday 28th March, midday GMT.
References
Alexiadou, Artemis, Liliane Haegeman & Melita Stavrou. 2007. Noun phrase in the
Generative perspective Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Cinque, Guglielmo. 2005. Deriving Greenberg's Universal 20 and Its Exceptions.
Linguistic Inquiry 36: 315-32.
Dryer, Matthew S. 1992. The Greenbergian word order correlations. Language 68:
81-138.
Dryer, Matthew. 2009. The branching direction theory revisited. Universals of
Language Today, ed. by S. Scalise, E. Magni & A. Bisetto. Berlin: Springer.
Emonds, Joseph E. 1976. A transformational approach to English syntax : root,
structure-preserving, and local transformations New York: Academic Press.
Greenberg, Joseph. 1963. Some universals of grammar with particular reference to
the order of meaningful elements. Universals of language, ed. by J.
Greenberg, 73-113. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Haddican, Bill. 2002. Aspects of DP word order across creoles. Paper presented
at the CUNY/SUNY/NYU Linguistics Mini-Conference, 20 April 2002.
Hawkins, John A. 1983. Word order universals New York: Academic Press.
Holmberg, Anders. 2000. Deriving OV Order in Finnish. The Derivation of VO and
OV, ed. by P. Svenonius, 123-52. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Julien, Marit. 2005. Nominal phrases from a Scandinavian perspective Amsterdam:
John Benjamins.
van Riemsdijk, Henk C. 1998. Categorial feature magnetosm: the endocentricity
and distribution of projections. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 2:
1-48.
Williams, Edwin. 1982. The NP cycle. Linguistic Inquiry 13: 27-295.
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