Full Title: Possession and its Expressions: Corpus Linguistics, Specialised Languages, Translation, Acquisition/Learning

Date: 03-Dec-2025 - 05-Dec-2025
Location: Valenciennes, France
Contact Person: Vassil Mostrov
Meeting Email: [email protected]

Linguistic Field(s): Language Acquisition; Semantics; Syntax; Text/Corpus Linguistics; Translation

Call Deadline: 10-May-2025

NEW DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION: MAY 10, 2025

Meeting Description:

The aim of this conference is to examine the notion of possession and its various forms (alienable/inalienable possession, part-whole relationships), with a focus on corpus linguistics. Given the advent of the theoretical framework of Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995), and in the era of digital humanities, new statistical methods (calculations of sparsity, density of occurrences, productivity, visualisations with decision trees, etc.) have emerged (cf. among others Van Wettere 2018; Goldberg 2019). This enables multifactorial analyses to be proposed on the basis of large amounts of data. It’s a fact that there are many studies about the notion of possession and its derivatives (for an overview, see, among others, Heine 1997; Herslund & Baron 2001; McGregor 2009; Dixon 2010), which have addressed fundamental questions such as the ‘conceptual’ or ‘linguistic’ nature of possessive relations, their (lack of) unity, and the diversity of strategies used to express them (genitive structures, prepositions, the verb to have and related verbs, etc.), whether from a monolingual, comparative or typological perspective. Yet, few studies are based on quantified corpus data. One of the main aims of the conference is precisely to fill this gap, by inviting contributions that put to the test the assertions made in the existing literature (which are based mostly on introspection) regarding actual use of the various mechanisms encoding possessive relations (in the broad sense). Studies – in synchrony or diachrony – on one, two or more languages, either of the same family or of different families, will be welcome. These may approach possessive and partitive relations from different theoretical points of view or fields ((formal) syntax, semantics, morphology, cognitive linguistics, pragmatics, etc., and their intersections), and focus on one or more linguistic manifestations (adnominal / predicative / external possessive constructions, morphological (non) marking of inalienable possessive relations, genitives, suffixation, so-called ‘possessive’ verbs, etc.). Studies in descriptive linguistics which are not based on corpus data (Godard 1986; Zribi-Hertz 2003) will also be evaluated, provided that they either address new questions on the subject or ‘classic’ questions treated from an original angle.

Furthermore, contrastive approaches, using data from parallel corpora, may address problems specific to the field of translation (including machine translation): how, in the target language, are structures encoding (in)alienable possession and part-whole relations (including meronymy, cf. Cruse 1986) translated from the source language? What is the degree of (lexical) overlap between structures in different languages that have superficially the same syntax (Van Peteghem 2006)?

While the main interest of the conference lies in the use and analysis of corpus data, these may present, at the socio-cultural level, diastratic or diatopic differences that are interesting to examine, or come from specialised languages, such as law (but not exclusively). Legal corpora – legislation or case law – in one language or in a cross-linguistic perspective can provide interesting data on the linguistic expression of possession in the legal sense.

Finally, papers on the acquisition of possessive structures or the way in which language disorders can affect their use and comprehension (psycholinguistic dimension) will be welcome, as well as papers in the field of didactics, addressing issues specific to the acquiring of possessive structures in a foreign language (such as French as a foreign language: Fabricius-Hansen et al. 2017) or in the native language (Chiss & David 2018). Submissions on the expression of possession in sign language will also be considered.

Call for Papers:

Languages spoken at the conference: French and English

Submission procedures:
Your proposal must not exceed 2000 words (excluding bibliography) and must be submitted on the symposium website (see “My Submissions” tab): https://possession.sciencesconf.org/

Provisional timetable:
- 3rd call: January 21, 2025
NEW DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION: MAY 10, 2025
- notification of authors: June 30, 2025
- programme & registration: September 2025
- Conference: December 3, 4 and 5, 2025

Organising committee:
Angelina Aleksandrova (Université Paris-Cité)
Véronique Lagae (Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France)
Vassil Mostrov (Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France)
Fayssal Tayalati (Université de Lille)

Plenary lectures:
Martin HASPELMATH, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig
Peter LAUWERS, Université de Gand
Marie-Anne SALLANDRE, Université Paris 8 & laboratoire SFL du CNRS

Scientific committee:
Anne Abeillé
Artemis Alexiadou
Michel Aurnague
Sandra Benazzo
Thomas Bertin
Olivier Bonami
Bert Cappelle
Anne Carlier
Marie Collombel
Céline Corteel
Denis Creissels
Georgette Dal
Walter De Mulder
Guillaume Desagulier
Carine Duteuil
Luca Gasparri
Martin Hilpert
Richard Huyghe
Marie-Laurence Knittel
Mohamed Lahrouchi
Peter Lauwers
Dominique Legallois
Suzanne Lesage
Rudy Loock
Elise Mignot
Fabio Montermini
Iva Novakova
Katia Paykin
Nicolas Quint
Mathilde Salles
Laure Sarda
Catherine Schnedecker
Elena Soare
Eva Soroli
Dejan Stosic
Amalia Todirascu
Delphine Tribout
Mark Van de Velde