Full Title: Adverbial clauses between subordination and coordination
Date: 20-May-2022 – 21-May-2022
Location: Cologne, Germany
Contact Person: Lukasz Jedrzejowski
Meeting Email: < click here to access email >
Web Site: http://www.lukasz-jedrzejowski.eu/adverbial-clauses-2/
Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Linguistic Theories; Semantics; Syntax
Call Deadline: 21-Mar-2022
Meeting Description:
The international conference “Adverbial clauses between subordination and coordination” is the first meeting of the scientific network “Adverbial clauses and subordinate dependency relationships” founded by German Science Foundation granted to Łukasz Jędrzejowski (grant number 455700544). The conference will be hosted by the Institute for German Language and Literature I – Linguistics at the University of Cologne, on May 20–21, 2022.
Recent versions of minimalist theorizing assume Set-Merge and Pair-Merge as two basic structure-building operations (Chomsky 2004, Bode 2020, Safir 2020). Interestingly, both operations can apply to adverbial clauses. The adverbial clause α can be Pair Merged to the XP-level to yield <α, XP>, α adjoined to XP (Larson 1990, Blümel & Pitsch 2019), or it can be c-selected and participate in a Set-Merge operation (cf. e.g. Pesetsky’s 1991 ‘If-Copying Rule’ for conditional clauses). Given the various functions of adverbial clauses and their variation, the major aim of this conference is to examine adverbial clauses synchronically and diachronically, and contribute to a better understanding of structure-building operations in general.
Synchronically, adverbial clauses have been divided into three classes: central/embedded, peripheral and non-integrated subordinate clauses, resulting in three distinct attachment heights, cf. Frey (to appear) and Schönenberger & Haegeman (to appear), differing from each other in what kinds of root phenomena they can host, and giving rise to distinct interpretative effects. Remarkably, non-integrated adverbial clauses including sentential speech act modifiers (e.g. ‘To be honest with you, I’ve never really liked them’) have been shown to exhibit striking properties typical of coordinate structures. The overlap of formal properties raises the issue of how adverbial clauses can be derived in a unified way (cf. Larson 2016).
Diachronically, new types of adverbial clauses have been mainly traced back to other subordinate environments, in particular to correlative/relative structures, cf. Eberhardt & Axel-Tober (to appear). Their origin usually involves grammaticalization, reanalysis, rebracketing and/or relabeling (van Gelderen 2021, Weiß 2021), and reorganizes the composition of formal features (van Gelderen 2008). However, less is known about the extent to which coordinative structures can give rise to adverbial clauses, and how these processes differ from the well-known cases restricted to subordinate contexts.
At this conference we would like to address syntactic as well as semantic issues relating to adverbial clauses, including cross-linguistic patterns and case studies from less known languages.
Topics for the conference include, but are not limited to, the following questions:
– How can adverbial modification of the matrix clause be modeled in such a way as to capture the basic properties of all adverbial clauses?
– Do all types of adverbial clauses involve a single structure-building operation (e.g. Pair-Merge)? How does adjunction work if an adverbial clause modifies a speech act? To what extent should c selection be reconsidered if an adverbial clause satisfies the theta-grid of a clause-embedding predicate?
– How do adverbial clauses emerge? Do they originate in subordinate environments and involve (only) a restructuring of the CP domain or can they also emerge out of coordinative structures presupposing a radical reorganization of the entire clause structure?
– What kind of syntactic/semantic processes does the diachrony of adverbial clauses evoke? How do formal features change and how do these changes affect the subordination system in general?
Invited speakers (all confirmed):
Regine Eckardt (University of Konstanz, Germany)
Liliane Haegeman (Ghent University, Belgium)
Richard Larson (Stony Brook University, USA)
Ken Safir (Rutgers University, USA)
Call for Papers:
We invite submission of abstracts for 30-minute oral presentations (with additional 15 minutes for questions) on topics that address the status of adverbial clauses on the continuum between subordination and coordination. These may include case studies, studies of trends, corpus results, as well as formal theories of particular adverbial clause types. We also welcome research at the interfaces with semantics and other areas, as long as the research makes a contribution to the area of adverbial clauses. Preference will be given to theoretically oriented papers and novel case studies.
Important dates:
– Submission deadline: 21 March 2022
– Notification of acceptance: 30 March 2022
Submission details:
– Abstracts should be submitted in PDF format to (adverbial-clausesuni-koeln.de), with all non-standard fonts embedded.
– Abstracts should not exceed 3 pages, which includes the data. An additional fourth page may be used for references.
– Abstracts must be submitted in letter or A4 format with 1 inch or 2.5 cm margins on all sides, single-spaced, and in a font no smaller than 11pt.
– Abstracts should be anonymous. Please make sure that PDF files do not have any identifying metadata.
– Submissions are limited to one individual and one joint abstract per author (or two joint abstracts per author).
– For more details, view the CFP here: http://www.lukasz-jedrzejowski.eu/conferences/Adverbial-clauses-2022-CfP.pdf
At this conference we would like to address syntactic as well as semantic issues relating to adverbial clauses, including cross-linguistic patterns and case studies from less known languages.