Date: 02-Sep-2019 – 02-Sep-2019
Location: Pavia, Italy
Contact Person: Silvia Luraghi

Call Deadline: 31-Mar-2019

Meeting Description:

The workshop aims at bringing together researchers on partitive cases, including genitives or ablatives used as partitives, partitive determiners, partitive pronouns, and other partitive elements, and focusing on their diachronic development, on dialectal variation, language contact and language acquisition.

It is the second Workshop of the PARTE Network, and follows the Workshop on Partitive Determiners and Partitive Case (Venice, 13-14 November 2017). PARTE (PARTititvity in European languages) is a network of nine research teams from European universities, which combines theoretical linguist, dialectologists, historical linguists, typologists, and applied linguists. It is funded by NWO (the Netherlands Organization for scientific research) and co-funded by the Universities of Zurich, Venice, Budapest and Pavia.

Call for Papers:

Abstracts are invited for oral and/or poster presentation.
Abstracts must be anonymous and no longer than two pages, 12 pt single spaced in pdf format.
Please submit your abstract through Easychair: https://easychair.org/cfp/Partitives2

Possible Topics:

– The rise of partitive cases, pronouns and determiners: origin of the development, grammaticalization, constructional change.
– Partitives and indefiniteness: Moravcsik (1978: 272) mentions among typical semantic correlates of partitives the definitness-indefinitness of the noun phrase. How does this function of partitives emerge, and how does it correlate with the morphological status of the partitive element (case marker vs. determiner, cf. Luraghi/Kittilä 2014: 20-27).
– What is the relation between partitive elements and other markers of NP indefiniteness, e.g. indefinite articles? Is the relation the same in different linguistic areas?
– How specific cases (genitives, ablatives, …) develop into partitive markers and possible constrains on ensuing syncretism: what is the relation between the genitive, the partitive and the ablative in languages that feature distinct cases? Do other cases e.g. locatives, or other determiners e.g. the numeral one/indefinite article (see Budd 2014 on Oceanic languages) also develop into partitives?
– Partitive elements deriving from case markers (cases, adpositions) do not show the typical function of case markers to indicate grammatical relations (Moravcsik 1978, Luraghi 2003, Luraghi/Kittilä 2014 among others). How does this shift come about precisely?
– Contact induced change and the rise or loss of partitive elements as documented in historical varieties (e.g. Ibero-Romance, see Carlier/Lemiroy 2014)
– Dialectal variation, including field studies and documentation of vernacular and sub-standard varieties of poorly documented languages.
– The acquisition of partitives: bilingual speakers and learners. How are partitive elements acquired? Do bilingual speakers of languages that feature different types of partitive elements show interference in their use of partitive elements?