SLE Workshop: Exploring the Limits of Complex Predicates

Date: 21-Aug-2024 - 24-Aug-2024
Location: University of Helsinki, Finland
Contact: Katya Aplonova
Contact Email: [email protected]
Meeting URL: https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2024/list-of-workshop-proposals/

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics

Workshop to be proposed for the 57th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, University of Helsinki, 21–24 August 2024
Organizers: Daniel Krausse (CNRS-LATTICE, Paris), Katya Aplonova (CNRS-LLACAN, Paris) & Patryk Czerwinski (University of Mainz)
Contact: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

Call for abstracts: We invite abstracts for our workshop titled Exploring the Limits of Complex Predicates, to be held as part of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, hosted by the University of Helsinki, 21–24 August 2024. Preliminary abstracts of 300 words must be received by 10 November 2023 to be included in the workshop proposal.

Workshop description: The term ‘complex predicates’ has received increasing attention in recent years (Amberber et al. 2010, Bowern 2014, Nash & Samvelian 2015, Nolan & Diedrichsen 2017, Csató et al. 2020, Krauße 2021), yet it still poses a challenge for theoretical linguistics, typology and language description. Complex predicates are generally defined as sequences of phonologically independent words, which together behave like a single predicate with one set of arguments; yet this definition covers a broad range of constructions whose boundaries are not always well defined. ‘Complex predicate’ is thus used as a cover term to include various syntactic phenomena such as serial verbs, converbs, light verbs, auxiliaries, verb compounds, and even noun incorporation (Anderson 2011, Bisang 1995, Baranova 2013, Butt 2010, Foley 2010, Müller 2002, Bril & Ozanne-Rivierre 2004, Evans 1997, Massam 2013, Van Valin 2005). We also wish to investigate where there are natural and typologically supported boundaries of verbal complex predicates within a still broader domain of multi-verb expression since for both domains the boundaries are not always clear (Ameka 2005, Aikhenvald 2011, Unterladstetter 2020).

Our workshop, proposed in relation to the international project ComPLETE (Vanhove et al. 2021), aims to bring together a range of topics that can be subsumed under the term ‘complex predicate’, from different perspectives, such as synchrony, diachrony and geographical distribution. We invite our participants to inspect their own data for non-canonical, unexpected or otherwise interesting verb constructions in terms of argument structure, TAM sharing, prosody as well as grammaticalization and lexicalization patterns. Presentations from different theoretical frameworks are also welcome a​​s long as they make clear cross-linguistic predictions.
Proposed topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Methodological approaches to complex predicates (e.g. databases, annotation schemas, questionnaires and other elicitation tools)
- Empirical and theoretical challenges to categorizing complex predicates into noun-based vs. verb-based complex predicates including rarely discussed cases such as ideophone-based complex predicates
- Theoretical motivations to distinguish between subtypes of complex predicates (e.g. auxiliaries vs. light verbs)
- Potential correlation between canonical or unexpected paths of grammaticalization / lexicalization and subtypes of complex predicates (e.g. serial verbs, converbs, light verbs, auxiliaries)
- Conceptual and terminological issues in the domain of complex predicates (e.g. the notion of finiteness, mechanisms of argument-sharing and argument-pooling in different types of complex predicates, etc.)
- Complex predicates in sign languages
- Complex predicates and corpus linguistics
- Delimiting the domain of verbal complex predicates within the broader domain of ‘multi-verb constructions’