tag:www.romanistik.de,2005:/aktuelles/2721Romanistik.de – Meldungenhttps://www.romanistik.de/aktuelles/27212017-09-14T22:50:54+02:002017-09-15T15:24:07+02:00CfP: Workshop on preverbal indefinite subjects - SLE Conference 2018 <p><strong>Deadline for abstract submission</strong>: 1 November 2017<br />
<strong>Send your abstract to</strong>: lena.karssenberg@kuleuven.be</p>
<h3><strong>Workshop description</strong></h3>
<p>In languages with Subject Verb word order, preverbal subjects tend to be definite rather than indefinite (e.g. Givón 1976, 1978; Leonetti 1998). However, the acceptability and frequency of preverbal indefinite subjects (henceforth <span class="caps">PIS</span>) vary cross-linguistically. For instance, it is reported that <span class="caps">PIS</span> are hardly acceptable in spoken French (1) (Lambrecht 1988, 1994; Van De Velde 2005; Cappeau & Deulofeu 2006; Cappeau 2008; Dobrovie-Sorin & Beyssade 2012), whereas they are much less problematic in English (see translation in (1)).</p>
<p>(1) ? <em>Un ami m’a apporté ce livre.</em><br />
‘A friend brought me that book.’<br />
(Cappeau & Deulofeu 2001:4, our translation)</p>
<p>The awkwardness of (1) may be related to the fact that in French (as in other discourse-configurational languages), preverbal subjects are usually discourse-given and topical in the sense of ‘that which the sentence is about’ (Givón 1976). Indefinite constituents, however, generally refer to discourse-new referents and are dispreferred as topics. As a consequence, speakers of French make extensive use of ‘presentational constructions’ such as the il y a cleft in order to introduce discourse-new, indefinite constituents (Lambrecht 2002; Karssenberg 2016, 2017; Karssenberg & Lahousse 2017).</p>
<p>(2) <em>Il y a une voiture qui se fait remorquer par une dépanneuse dans le parking…</em> <br />
‘There’s a car that’s getting towed by a tow truck in the parking lot.’ <br />
(Karssenberg 2017:183)</p>
<p>In a similar vein, although <span class="caps">PIS</span> are acceptable in Dutch when accompanied by prosodic stress (3a), other presentational constructions, such as “er is + NP + VP” can also be used in order to introduce discourse-new indefinite referents (3b).</p>
<p>(3) a. <em><span class="caps">IEMAND</span> heeft koffie over haar arm gemorst.</em> <br />
<span class="caps">SOMEONE</span> has coffee over her arm spilled. <br />
“Someone spilled coffee over her arm.”<br />
b. <em>Er is een trein ontspoord.</em> <br />
There is a train derailed.<br />
“A train has derailed.”<br />
(Belligh 2016)</p>
<p>Other licensing conditions have also been reported. For instance, Cheng & Downing (2014) argue that <span class="caps">PIS</span> in Durban Zulu (see (4)) can be accounted for in terms of the presence of a presupposition of existence rather than the opposition topical/non-topical.</p>
<p>(4) <em>úúma ámá-nye ámá-phutha á-bálúlékiile, ngéké sí-khíphe lencwáadi</em><br />
if 6-some 6-error 6SUBJ-be.major.tam never we-publish this.book <br />
‘If (some) mistakes are major, we will never publish this book.’<br />
(Cheng & Downing 2014:20)</p>
<p>The goal of this workshop is to bring together insights about <span class="caps">PIS</span> in different languages with SV word order, in order to come to a better understanding of the acceptability and frequency of <span class="caps">PIS</span> and their licensing conditions. Questions we intend to address in this workshop include, but are not limited to, the following:</p>
<ul>
<li>Which types of <span class="caps">PIS</span> are acceptable in languages with SV word order (e.g. indefinite pronouns, partitive or quantified NPs…)?</li>
<li>What is the distribution of <span class="caps">PIS</span> across different genres/usage contexts (e.g. newspaper vs. online forum, spoken vs. written) of a given language?</li>
<li>Which are the (semantic, morphosyntactic, information structural) licensing factors for <span class="caps">PIS</span>?</li>
<li>To what extent do licensing conditions for <span class="caps">PIS</span> vary cross-linguistically?</li>
<li>How can cross-linguistic differences in the acceptability and/or frequency of <span class="caps">PIS</span> be explained?</li>
<li>How can different methodological approaches (e.g. corpus linguistic methods, experimental approaches) be combined to gain a deeper and more complete insight into <span class="caps">PIS</span>?</li>
<li>…</li>
</ul>
<p>We welcome contributions about all languages with SV word order and we are particularly interested in analyses that are based on empirical work (corpus research, experimental studies).</p>
<h3><strong>Abstract submission</strong></h3>
<p>Please send an abstract of max. 300 words (excluding references) that clearly states the research questions, data analysis and results to lena.karssenberg@kuleuven.be before November 1st 2017.</p>
<p><strong>Convenors</strong>: Lena Karssenberg (KU Leuven) & Laura Rosseel (KU Leuven/ University of Cologne)</p>
<h3>References</h3>
<p>Belligh, Thomas. 2016. The influence of activation status on the Dutch presentational alternation. Paper presented at the International workshop on non-prototypical clefts, KU leuven, 15/12/2016.<br />
Cappeau, Paul. 2008. Il manque des indéfinis ! Ou comment l’oral nous oblige à revoir la description des indéfinis. Le français aujourd’hui 162(3). 73-83.<br />
Cappeau, Paul & José Deulofeu. 2001. Partition et topicalisation: Il y en a “stabilisateur” de sujets et de topiques indéfinis. Cahiers de praxématique 37. 45-82.<br />
Cappeau, Paul & José Deulofeu. 2006. Les “indéfinis” en relation avec la position sujet dans trois types de constructions prédicatives. In Actes du colloque de Paris Prédication et Indéfinis, 125-138. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris Sorbonne.<br />
Cheng, Lisa L. S. & Laura J. Downing. 2014. Indefinite subjects in Durban Zulu. In Proceedings of the Workshop BantuSynPhonIS, Vol. 57, 5-25. Berlin: Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft.<br />
Dobrovie-Sorin, Carmen & Claire Beyssade. 2012. Redefining indefinites. Dordrecht: Springer.<br />
Givón, Talmy. 1976. Topic, pronoun, and grammatical agreement. In Charles N. Li (ed.), Subject and topic, 151-188. New York: Academic Press.<br />
Givón, Talmy. 1978. Definiteness and referentiality. In Joseph H. Greenberg, Charles A. Ferguson & Edith A. Moravcsik (eds.), Universals of human language, Vol. 4, 291-330. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.<br />
Karssenberg, Lena. 2016. French il y a clefts, existential sentences and the focus-marking hypothesis. Journal of French Language Studies. 1-26.<br />
Karssenberg, Lena. 2017. Ya les oiseaux qui chantent. A corpus analysis of French il y a clefts. KU Leuven PhD dissertation.<br />
Karssenberg, Lena & Karen Lahousse. 2017. Les SN définis et indéfinis dans les clivées en il y a. In Caroline Lachet, Luis Meneses-Lerín & Audrey Roig (eds.), Contraintes linguistiques. À propos de la complémentation nominale, 197-210. Brussels: <span class="caps">PIE</span> Peter Lang.<br />
Lambrecht, Knud. 1988. Presentational cleft constructions in spoken French. In John Haiman & Sandra A. Thompson (eds.), Clause combining in grammar and discourse, 135-179. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.<br />
Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. Information structure and sentence form: Topic, focus and the mental representations of discourse referents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.<br />
Lambrecht, Knud. 2002. Topic, focus and secondary predication. The French presentational relative construction. In Claire Beyssade, Reineke Bok-Bennema, Frank Drijkoningen & Paola Monachesi (eds.), Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2000, 171-212. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.<br />
Leonetti, Manuel. 1998. A Relevance-theoretic account of the property predication restriction. In Villy Rouchota & Andreas H. Jucker (eds.), Current issues in Relevance Theory, 141-167. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.<br />
Van De Velde, Danièle. 2005. Les interprétations partitive et existentielle des indéfinis dans les phrases existentielles locatives. Travaux de linguistique 50(1). 37-52.</p>Lena Karssenberg