Full Title: Factors in Natural Language Design – the Nominal Domain and Beyond
Short Title: FIND

Date: 11-Dec-2023 - 12-Dec-2023
Location: Göttingen, Germany
Contact Person: Andreas Blümel
Meeting Email: [email protected]
Web Site: https://sites.google.com/view/andreasbluemel/project/find-workshop-2023

Linguistic Field(s): Syntax

Call Deadline: 10-Sep-2023

Meeting Description:

The workshop’s title alludes to Chomsky 2005, suggesting that the following factors "enter into the growth of language in the individual": 1) genetic endowment, 2) experience, and 3) principles not specific to the language faculty. Much research since explores the extent to which the third Factor (e.g., principles of computational efficiency) plays a role in determining properties formerly attributed to core syntax, thereby minimizing Universal Grammar (Factor one), cf., e.g., Epstein, Kitahara, Seely (2018, 2021). While it is already challenging to align these theoretical guidelines with descriptive work on natural language phenomena, additional tasks lurk in the background. Accounting for the variation of grammars is one of them, including the right conception of parameters (cf. e.g., Longobardi 2018; Roberts 2019)? How do works on Narrow Syntax square with results from works at its interfaces, roughly: form and meaning? This workshop aims at addressing such, and more, questions with an empirical emphasis on the nominal domain.
This year marks the 40. anniversary of Szabolcsi’s (1983) seminal work on the peculiar distribution of possessors in Hungarian, possessor agreement, and the influential idea that projections of functional heads dominate the lexical nominal core. Many works since have applied these and comparable ideas across languages and constructions, now commonly known as the DP-hypothesis. This is a great occasion to re-assess these and related themes. Recent work suggests a revived fundamental interest in the syntactic treatment of nominal phrases, develops alternatives to, and highlights problems of, the DP-hypothesis (cf., e.g., Bruening 2009; contributions in Blümel & Holler 2020). Bošković (2005) et seq has persistently developed the idea that UG provides a parameter which makes available the functional head D, separating languages into NP- and DP-languages with many correlates elsewhere in the languages’ grammars. Subsequent works have indicated that a refined, gradual analytical apparatus might be necessary for descriptive adequacy (Talić 2017; Oda 2022) or that the one-way correlation between Left Branch Extraction and the absence articles might be wrong (Pankau 2018; Barrie 2018). Other works explicitly defend or continue employing the hypothesis with or without discussion, emphasizing language- or dialect-specific aspects relevant for it, some with extensive empirical coverage both synchronically and diachronically (cf. Julien 2005; Brandner 2008, 2014; Lander & Haegeman 2014; Syed & Simpson 2017; etc.). Some issues include what decisive empirical criteria for or against the DP-hypothesis might be (Salzmann 2020, 2022), or which analytical alternatives recent theorizing provides for (Blümel to appear).
All these works in one form or another subscribe to a version of the Borer-Chomsky conjecture of parametric variation as properties of inflectional/functional elements. How does this framework square with the view that "[t]he variety of languages might be localized in peripheral aspects of lexicon and in externalization; perhaps completely, we might someday learn" (Chomsky 2021: 11-12)? Do peripheral aspects of lexical items affect syntactic computation? Within the Borer-Chomsky view, the answer is "yes" (assuming "peripheral" means inflectional features). In the perspective expressed in the quote, it is less clear that syntactic computation is directly sensitive to properties of lexical items.
A related field of research investigates typological universals. One area has been investigated particularly: the serialization of demonstratives, numerals, adjectives, and nouns (Greenberg 1963; Cinque 2005; Dryer 2018). Some results indicate a shift of the explanatory burden from Factor 1 to Factor 3, i.e., from syntactic encoding to outsourcing to language independent cognitive principles (cf. e.g., Martin et al 2019). Where do we stand in this domain? What are some of the empirical or theoretical challenges?

We are delighted to announce the following invited speakers:
- Željko Bošković (University of Connecticut)
- Ellen Brandner (University of Stuttgart)
- Benjamin Bruening (University of Delaware)
- Marit Julien (University of Lund)
- Hisatsugu Kitahara (Keio University)
- Daniel Seely (Eastern Michigan University)

Final Call for Papers:

This 2-day workshop takes place in connection with the DFG-funded project “Revisiting Phrasal Units in the Nominal Domain” / “Neue Wege zur Nominalgruppe” at the University of Göttingen, one of the most vibrant places in Germany for formal linguistics (see e.g. the RTG "Form-Meaning Mismatches"). We invite contributions that address and explore some of the pressing theoretical and empirical issues regarding the syntactic structure of nominal phrases, including their interfaces at the form and meaning side, the role processing and acquisition play, and the like. We also welcome contributions on Factor 3 beyond the nominal domain.

We invite abstracts for 20-minute talks, followed by 10 minutes Q&A. Everybody may submit maximally two abstracts, only one of which may be single-authored.

The deadline for the abstract submissions has been extended to September 10th, 2023.

Submission Link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=find2023

Abstract Guidelines:
- Max. 2 pages of A4 paper, including references, examples, tables and figures
- 12pt Times New Roman font or similar
- 1in (2.54cm) margins on all sides
- The abstract must not reveal the identity of the author in any way
- PDF format

We are aiming at publishing a selection of contributions.