Appel: 1st FARMM Challenge Formal Approaches to Romance Microvariation and Microcontact

Appel: 1st FARMM Challenge Formal Approaches to Romance Microvariation and Microcontact

https://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-3438.html

Date: 15-Feb-2019 – 15-Feb-2019
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Contact Person: Anna Pineda

Call Deadline: 30-Nov-2018

Meeting Description:

The FARMM initiative organizes the first Challenge, a workshop oriented at providing an answer to specific questions to a specific datasets within a relevant phenomenon. The event will be held in Barcelona, 15 February 2019. The empirical domain of this challenge is clitics. The datasets are the following:

Dataset 1

Current syntactic analyses claim that in most Romance languages clitic placement occurs in either T or v (Kayne 1991, Sportiche 1998, Roberts 2010, Gallego 2016 a.o.). However, in several varieties proclitic/enclitic placement is affected by phenomena/features encoded in C:

– in most Romance languages, clitic placement is affected by Finiteness, see (1);
– in all medieval Romance languages and in present day western Ibero-Romance, enclisis is forbidden in sentences featuring Focus/Wh fronting, see (2);
– subject clitic inversion is conditioned by illocutionary Force (Munaro 2010);
– enclisis is never permitted with complementisers introducing irrealis/subjunctive clauses, whereas realis/indicative clauses are more liberal with respect to clitic placement (see Fernández-Rubiera 2010; Pescarini & Benincà 2014). If the two Cs are located respectively in Fin0 and Force0 (Ledgeway 2007), the pattern in (3) and (4) confirms that C heads affect cliticisation.

(1)
a. dice che lo sa (Italian)
pro.says that it= knows
‘He/she says that he/she know is’
b. Dice di saperlo
pro.says to know=it
‘He/she says that he/she know is’

(2)
a. Quem me chamou / *chamou-me? (Port.)
Who 1.ACC= call.PST.3SG call.PST.3SG=1.ACC
‘Who called me?’
b. Só ele a entende / *entende-a
Only he 3SG.F= understand.3SG understand.3SG=3SG.F
‘Only he understands her’

(3)
a. ‘do:ʧə ka sə lu ‘maɲɲə ‘sɛmprə
says that to.him/her-self= it= eats always
b. ‘do:ʧə ka ‘maɲɲə sə lu ‘sɛmprə
says that eats =to.him/her-self =it always
‘He/she says that he/she always eats it’

(4)
a. ‘wojə kə tə lu ‘mɪɲɲə
I.want that to.you= it= eat
b. *’wojə kə ‘mɪɲɲə te lu
I.want that you.eat =to.yourself =it
‘I want you to eat it’

Dataset 2

Phonological analyses cannot always account for stress shift phenomena triggered by enclitic placement, see (1) and (2). Enclisis/proclisis asymmetries arguably result from a lexical alternation, as witnessed by patterns of fully-fledged suppletion, cf. (3).

(1)
a. t o ‘portə (Neapolitan)
you= it= I.bring
‘I’ll bring it to you’
b. porta-t-íllə
bring=to.yourself=him/them.M/it.M
‘bring him/it.m/them for you’

(2)
Finir-lù ‘to end it’ (Viozene, Lig.)
saver-lù ‘to know it’
portama-rù ‘let us take it’
vindirù ‘sell it’
servirsì ‘to help oneself’

(3)
a. Il me le donne (French)
He to.me= it= gives
‘He gives it to me’
b. Donne-le-moi!
Give=it=to.me
‘Give it to me!’

The nature of the alternation, however, remains unclear. Ordóñez and Repetti 2006 argue that the alternation results from the presence of two classes of pronouns, viz. weak vs clitic (but see Pescarini 2018 a.o.). However, one wonders how the distribution of lexical variants – regardless of their inner structure – is ultimately linked to (or affected by) the syntactic mechanisms yielding proclitic/enclitic placement (see above).

Challenge –> See Call Information
Invited Speakers –> See Call Information

Call for Papers:

Challenge:

How can we model clitic placement in order to capture the above interaction between C heads and clitic placement?

How can the same model account for the interaction between lexical selection and clitic placement in order to account for patterns of allomorphy and suppletion?

What are the predictions that your model makes with respect to contact between varieties with clitics obeying different constraints?

Invited Speakers:

Rita Manzini (University of Florence)
Paco Ordóñez (Stony Brook University)
Ian Roberts (University of Cambridge)

Conference Venue:

Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Organizing Committee:

Roberta D’Alessandro (Utrecht University)
Anna Pineda (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

Scientific Committee:

Heather Burnett
Jan Casalicchio
Silvio Cruschina
Roberta D’Alessandro
Adina Dragomirescu
Ángel Gallego
Alexandru Nicolae
Diego Pescarini
Anna Pineda
Francesc Torres-Tamarit

Submission Format:

Papers addressing one or more aspects of the challenge are welcome. New data that can shed light on the issues are particularly encouraged. Each paper presentation will be allotted 25 minutes plus 10 minutes for discussion. Submissions are limited to a maximum of one individual and one joint abstract, or two joint abstracts per author. Authors are asked to submit their anonymous abstracts as a PDF file to the following address formal.microvariationgmail.com (you will receive a confirmation email soon after your submission arrives).

Abstracts should be no longer than two pages in length (including examples and references), in a 12¬point font, single line spacing and 2,5 cm. margins.

Important Dates:

Deadline for submission: 30 November 2018
Notification of acceptance: 15 December 2018

Selected References:

Bafile, Laura. 1994. La riassegnazione postlessicale dell’accento nel napoletano. Quaderni del Dipartimento di Linguistica dell’Università di Firenze, 5: 1-23.
Fernández-Rubiera, Francisco 2010. Force, Finiteness and the placement of clitics in Western Iberian Romance languages, Estudos de Linguistica Galega 2: 75-95
Manzini, M. Rita & Leonardo M. Savoia. 2017. Enclisis/Proclisis alternations in Romance: allomorphies and (re)ordering. Transactions of the Philological Society, 115: 98-136.
Munaro, Nicola. 2010. Towards a hierarchy of clause types. In Mapping the Left Periphery, ed. by Paola Benincà & Nicola Munaro. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 125-162.
Ordóñez, Francisco and Lori Repetti. 2006. “Stressed Enclitics?” In New Analyses on Romance Linguistics: Volume II: Phonetics, Phonology and Dialectology (Selected Papers from the 35th LSRL 35), ed. by Jean-Pierre Montreuil, 167-181. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Pescarini, Diego. Forthcoming. Stressed enclitics are not weak pronouns: a plea for allomorphy. In Romance Linguistics 13, Selected papers from the 46th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), ed. by Francisco Ordóñez & Lori Repetti. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Pescarini, Diego and Paola Benincà. 2014 ‘Clitic placement in the dialect of S. Valentino in Abruzzo citeriore’ Archivio Glottologico Italiano 101: 37-65
Roberts, Ian. 2010. Agreement and head movement. Clitics, Incorporation and Defective Goals, Cambridge University Press.
Sportiche, Dominique. 1998. Pronominal Clitic Dependencies, in Language Typology. In Clitics in the European Languages, ed. by Henk van Riemsdijk. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 679-708.