LINGUIST List 7.833

Thu Jun 6 1996

Calls: Phonology, Germanic syntax, OV/VO word o

Editor for this issue: Ann Dizdar <dizdartam2000.tamu.edu>

Directory

1. Jeroen van de Weijer, Final calls for papers: Phonology; Germanic syntax; OV/VO word o

Final call for papers: three HIL conferences

The Holland Institute of Generative Linguistics (HIL) will organize
three conferences and workshops in the beginning of 1997 at the Vrije
Universiteit in Amsterdam. HIL will then exist five years. Here are the final
calls for papers for these conferences, viz.

 * The Third HIL Phonology Conference (9-11 January)
 * The Twelfth Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop (9-11 January)
 * The OV/VO Workshop (7-8 January)


 HILP 3
 Call for Papers

On 9-11 January 1997, the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam will host the
3rd Holland Institute of Generative Linguistics Conference on
Phonology, HILP 3.

Abstracts should be submitted before July 1st 1996. The address of
the selection committee is:

 Selection Committee HILP 3
 Prof. Geert Booij
 Vrije Universiteit, vakgroep Taalkunde
 De Boelelaan 1105
 1081 HV Amsterdam
 The Netherlands

Please send 5 anonymous abstracts.

Speakers whose abstract is selected will receive a (partial)
reimbursement of their traveling costs.

E-mail: booijgjet.let.vu.nl
WWW: http://oasis.leidenuniv.nl/hil/confs/hilp3/hilp3.htm


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 12th COMPARATIVE GERMANIC SYNTAX WORKSHOP

 Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam/HIL
 9-11 January 1997
 ================================

On 9-11 January 1997, the 12th meeting of the Comparative Germanic
Syntax Workshop will be held at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam/HIL.

Abstracts are solicited for 40-minute presentations (followed by 15
minutes of discussion) which address topics in the syntax of the
Germanic languages from a comparative point of view.

To submit, send *five copies* of an abstract whose length should not
exceed 2 pages (single-spaced; 12pt. font), including examples,
diagrams and references. Please add a 3x5 card stating the title of
your abstract, your name and affiliation (including E-mail address,
fax and telephone number).

Abstracts should be received at the address given below by 1 July
1996. (Submissions by E-mail or fax will be accepted; please make
sure that, if you opt for this route, your abstract is properly
decipherable.)

Speakers will be partially reimbursed for their travel expenses.

 Address your queries and send your submissions to:

 CGSW 12
 c/o Marcel den Dikken
 Holland Institute of Generative Linguistics
 Vakgroep Taalkunde (ATW)
 Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
 De Boelelaan 1105
 1081 HV Amsterdam
 The Netherlands

 Fax: +31 20 4446500
 Phone: +31 20 4446482
 E-mail: dikkenjet.let.vu.nl

!! NOTE: from 13 June onwards, queries about this conference (but NOT
submissions) should be addressed to Hans Broekhuis, e-mail:
hans.broekhuislet.uva.nl


 WWW: http://oasis.leidenuniv.nl/hil/confs/cgsw12/cgsw.htm


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 WORKSHOP ANNOUNCEMENT

 On the typological differences between VO- and OV-languages:
 Minimalism and the Uniform Base Hypothesis

 Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam/HIL
 7-8 January 1997
 ================================

On 7-8 January 1997, the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam/HIL will host
a workshop specially focused on the typological differences between
VO- and OV-languages and their formal account, against the background
of recent theoretical developments in the minimalist framework
(Chomsky 1993, 1995) and Kayne's (1994) antisymmetry thesis. The
theme of the workshop is detailed in what follows.

In the eighties, the distinction between VO-languages, on the one
hand, and OV-languages, on the other, used to be generally accounted
for by assuming a directionality parameter on government (Travis
1984): in VO-languages canonical government is to the right, so that
the (nominal) complement of a verb must be on the right of the verb
in order to get Case, whereas OV-languages set the canonical
government directionality parameter to the left, so that the
complement of the verb must be on the left in order to get Case. With
the introduction of Checking Theory (Chomsky 1993), the postulation
of a canonical direction of Case-assignment was rendered
superfluous, and in fact unstatable; in all languages, checking the
Case-feature of the nominal complement of the verb takes place in the
specifier position of some functional projection (FP, commonly
identified as AgrOP) above VP: by moving the object into SpecFP and
moving V into F, as in (1), the verb and its complement enter into a
Spec-Head relation and Case-checking can take place.

(1) ... [FP .... F ... [VP ... V Object]
 ^\ ^\___________/ /
 \_________________/

In principle, this proposal makes it possible to assume that the
distinction between VO- and OV-languages is only a
"surface"-phenomenon, which is due to the level at which the
pertinent movement operation takes place -- a difference which is
expressible in terms of the strength of the N-features of F, such
that in VO-languages, in contradistinction to OV-languages, the
N-feature is weak and movement of NP is postponed to LF, and is
consequently not reflected in the phonetic realization of the
construction.

The prospect of reducing directionality effects to the parametrized
strength of the features of functional heads is interesting from the
perspective of language acquisition (since it allows us to restrict
parametrization to properties of the functional system; the
directionality of government approach held no such promise). It also
comports well with Kayne's (1994) independent argument that all
languages have a specifier-head-complement order in the base, and
that all apparent complement-head orders are transformationally
derived by movement of the complement into some specifier position
that c-commands the surface position of the head.

Kayne's hypothesis has yielded a host of problems for the
description of (especially) the OV-languages, not least because it
followed from Kayne's proposal that movement is always leftward.
Consequently, besides the fact that all proposals that relied on a
government directionality parameter had to be recast in terms of
movement, all accounts that involved rightward movement had to be
reformulated as cases of leftward movement. Today witnesses a wide
variety of proposals along these lines, typically taking the
following form: if an element Y surfaces to the right of some element
X in language La, whereas the order is reversed in language Lb, then
either X takes an additional movement step in overt syntax in La
that is lacking in Lb, or Y undergoes an overt-syntactic movement
operation in Lb that is lacking in La. Proposals of this general
type often reach a fair degree of observational and descriptive
adequacy; their explanatory adequacy ultimately rests upon the
identification of appropriate triggers for the postulated movement
operations, triggers that (in the optimal case) are independently
motivated.

This workshop is NOT primarily interested in accounts aimed at
showing that minimalist and antisymmetric approaches to the OV/VO
distinction can be conceived and technically made to work. Rather,
this workshop aims to investigate the systematic (typological)
properties of VO- and OV-languages. For instance, predicative
adjectives always follow the verb in VO-languages (see English (2a)),
whereas they always precede the verb in the OV-languages (cf. Dutch
(2b)).

(2) a. that we painted the house green.
 b. dat we het huis groen schilderden.

On a directionality parameter approach there are various ways to
account for this. One proposal involves assuming that the accusative
object and the resultative adjective form a Small Clause: since the
object is assigned Case by the verb under government, the complete
Small Clause must follow the verb if canonical government is to the
right, whereas it has to precede it if canonical government is to the
left. In the minimalist and antisymmetric framework, explanations of
this sort are lost. For example, one could in principle imagine a(n
unwanted) derivation of the type in (3) in which only the verb and
the object move, but in which the adjectival predicate remains in
situ.

(3) ... [FP .... F ... [VP ... V [SC NP Predicate]
 ^\ ^\___________/ /
 \___________________/

Since movement of the object is triggered by some strong N-feature
of the functional head F, descriptive generalizations such as
"adjectival predicates precede the verb iff the accusative object
precedes the verb" constitute a tough challenge for the new framework
outlined above, since apparently the position of the resultative
adjective must in some way be made sensitive to the strength of the
N-feature of F (which is responsible for the obligatorily overt
movement of the NP), which is not an easy task.

That there is tight relationship between the position of the object
with respect to the verb, on the one hand, and the position of other
elements and the verb, on the other, is quite clear from the
diachronic development of English. Old English can be characterized
as an OV-language, and elements such as resultative adjectives,
particles and stranded prepositions (generally) preceded the verb (in
clause-final position). After the change from OV to VO, these
elements henceforth occurred after the verb. And there are reasons
to assume that these changes took place simultaneously. The need to
arrive at a principled account of word order generalizations such as
the one given above is evident from the fact that numerous
generalizations of this sort can be formulated.

Typological questions concerning the OV/VO dichotomy, or, more
generally, the distinction between head-finality/initiality, arise
not only in syntax. In morphology, it seems that languages treat
derivation in an essentially uniform fashion (the head being final;
see Williams' 1981 Righthand Head Rule), while difficult typological
challenges are posed in the domain of compounding, which, as far as
head placement is concerned, is cross-linguistically much more
diverse. Consider for instance the word-order difference between the
Romance and Germanic languages within deverbal compounds: French
"ouvre-bonte" (V-N) vs. Dutch "blikopener"/English "can-opener" (N-V)
(see Kayne 1994 for discussion). This difference does not strictly
correlate with the OV/VO dichotomy in syntax (witness the fact that
English behaves like Dutch, not like French), which raises the
question whether the factors determining head placement in morphology
are different from those that rule head placement in syntax. If the
latter is a function of the strength of morphological features of
functional heads, then how should the former be given formal shape?
The answer to this question will depend to a significant extent on
other important questions about morphology: (i) where morphological
complexes are built, (ii) whether morphological structure (i.e. the
internal structure of morphological complexes) features functional
elements or not, and (iii) whether the internal structure of words
(the lexicon) comes under the purview of the Linear Correspondence
Axiom.

In suprasegmental phonology, syllables are taken to consist of a
structure (e.g. the classic [Onset [Nucleus Coda]] structure; see
also Dependency Phonology) which parallels the Kayne type
antisymmetric layout of syntactic structures: the head (Nucleus)
precedes its dependent (Coda), and the constituent comprising the
head and its dependent linearly follows the "specifier" (Onset).
Metrical phonology has moreover witnessed a recent shift away from
Hayes (1982) type foot typologies distinguishing iambic and trochaic
patterns, towards a systematically trochaic (i.e. left-headed) foot
inventory, in apparent harmony with the antisymmetric movement in
syntactic theory. Meanwhile, at the higher level of prosodic
structure it seems (cf. Nespor & Vogel 1982, 1986) that there is an
OV/VO-distinction reflected in the relative prominence of the
constituents that form a phonological phrase -- weak/strong in
VO-languages vs. strong/weak in OV-languages. It is not clear how
the observed prominence structure of the phonological phrase can be
related to the strength of the N-features of functional heads.

Nespor et al. (1995) argue that the prosodic structure of the
phonological phrase is an essential aid in the child's task of
finding out whether the language it is acquiring is of the OV or the
VO type. This leads us into the realm of the acquisition of
word-order related phenomena, both in the realm of L1 acquisition and
in the domain of second language learning.

With regard to the former, it is to be noted that children in the
earliest stage of speech production consistently use the order of the
verb and the object found in the adult language, as is evident from
the Dutch and English examples in (4a) and (4b), respectively.

(4) a. eat candy
 b. snoepjes eten

Kayne's antisymmetry would lead us to say that the Dutch order is the
result of overt-syntactic movement of the NP "snoepjes" into some
higher SpecFP. One is then led to ask whether there is any other
evidence that movement of this type takes place at this stage of
language development.

With regard to the latter, there is a protracted debate going on
about the influence of the source language on the acquisition of
word-order patterns in the object language. To take a specific
example, it seems to be the case that in the acquisition of the word
order of Dutch possessive DPs, Moroccan and Turkish learners follow
different strategies, which suggests that the properties of the
learner's mother tongue play a role in L2 acquisition of word order.
How can this source language influence be accommodated in a
minimalist and antisymmetric approach to syntactic structure?


 CALL FOR PAPERS

- Abstracts are solicited for 40-minute presentations (followed by
15 minutes of discussion) which contribute to the empirical inventory
and theoretical analysis of the systematically differential
properties of VO- and OV-languages.

- Contributions addressing this overall theme against the
background of *all* areas of linguistic specialization (syntax,
phonology, morphology, semantics, language acquisition etc.) are
equally welcome.

- Submissions that entirely confine themselves to showing that
minimalist and antisymmetric approaches to the OV/VO distinction can
be conceived and technically made to work will *not* be eligible for
selection.

- To submit, send *three copies* of an abstract whose length
should not exceed 2 pages (single-spaced; 12pt. font), including
examples, diagrams and references. Please add a 3x5 card stating the
title of your abstract, your name and affiliation (including E-mail
address, fax and telephone number).

- Abstracts should be received at the address given below by 1
July 1996. (Submissions by E-mail or fax will be accepted; please
make sure that, if you opt for this route, your abstract is properly
decipherable.)

 Send your submissions to:

 Workshop OV/VO
 c/o Marcel den Dikken
 Holland Institute of Generative Linguistics
 Vakgroep Taalkunde (ATW)
 Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
 De Boelelaan 1105
 1081 HV Amsterdam
 The Netherlands

 Fax: +31 20 4446500
 Phone: +31 20 4446482
 E-mail: dikkenjet.let.vu.nl

!! NOTE: from 13 June onwards, queries about this conference (but NOT
submissions) should be addressed to Hans Broekhuis, e-mail:
hans.broekhuislet.uva.nl

 WWW: http://oasis.leidenuniv.nl/hil/confs/ovvo/ovvo.htm

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