Appel à contributions : atelier “The typology of non-canonical subjects”, 1-3 juillet 2026, Lyon

Cher·es collègues,

Je me permets d’attirer votre attention sur le projet de workshop ci-dessous, que Jóhanna Barðdal, Joren Somers et moi souhaiterions déposer pour le prochain congrès de l’ALT, qui se tiendra à Lyon (2) sous les auspices de DDL en juillet prochain. Notre proposition porterait sur la typologie des sujets non-canoniques, notamment (mais pas exclusivement, voir ci-dessous) les sujets obliques. Les propositions (1 page hors références) doivent m’être adressées pour le 26 avril à l’adresse pierre-yves.modicom@univ-lyon3.fr (en cc de ce message).

The typology of non-canonical subjects

Workshop proposal for ALT 2026, Lyon

convenors: Pierre-Yves Modicom, Joren Somers & Jóhanna Barðdal

At least since Keenan (1976), prototypical subjects have been defined in terms of coding and behavioral properties, such as case marking, clause-initial position, subject-verb inversion, conjunction reduction, raising, and control. These have been successfully applied to several languages and have thus led to the discovery of non-canonically case-marked subjects, starting with Icelandic (Andrews 1976, Thráinsson 1976, inter alia) and the South Asian languages (Masica 1976, Kachru, Kachru & Bhatia 1976, inter alia). Later, such non-nominative subjects have been documented in additional Germanic languages like Faroese (Barnes 1986) and German (Barðdal 2006, Somers et al. 2025, inter alia), alongside a substantial body of work on the early Germanic languages, like Gothic, Old English, Old Saxon, Old Norse-Icelandic and Middle High German (cf. Barðdal 2023 and the references therein).

Additional Indo-European languages featuring non-nominative subjects are Russian (Moore & Perlmutter 2000), Old French (Mathieu 2006), Romanian (Ilioaia 2023), and Latin and Ancient Greek (Barðdal et al. 2023, Cluyse, Somers & Barðdal 2025). Non-nominative subjects have also been documented in further languages around the globe, such as Japanese (Shibatani 1999) and Korean (Yoon 2004), Hebrew (Landau 2009, Pat-El 2018), native American languages (Hermon 1985), the Dravidian languages (Verma & Mohanan 1990), the Dardic languages (Steever 1998), the Tibeto-Burman languages (Bickel 2004) and the Cariban languages (Castro Alves 2018).

Today, 50 years after Keenan’s monumental work, the aim of this workshop is to once more bring non-nominative subjects to the fore and to specifically focus on:

 

• a cross-linguistic typology of subjects
• the status of subject criteria in language comparison 
• theories of argument structure and valency, e.g. lexical vs. non-lexical theories of argument structure constructions
• the mapping between semantic roles, information status and syntactic coding of subject arguments
• the similarities and differences between phenomena such as differential subject marking and split alignment across languages

 

The workshop is also open to any typological contribution to the following issues:

 

• the semantic motivation behind i) non-canonical case marking of subjects, ii) valency alternation in the selection of subject arguments iii) split alignment or iv) differential subject marking
• non-canonical subjects in languages with alignment systems other than nominative–accusative
• syntactic alternations involving non-nominative subjects, like oblique anticausativization (cf. Barðdal et al. 2020)
• alternating Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat or Acc-Nom/Nom-Acc predicates 
• non-canonically case-marked subjects in non-case languages, like Dutch (cf. Somers 2023)
• morphological variation in subject case marking
• the emergence, evolution and loss of non-canonical subjects in language history

Please submit your abstract of one page, excluding references, to pierre-yves.modicom (AT) univ-lyon3.fr before April 26th, 2025. 

References

Allen, Cynthia L. 1995. Case marking and reanalysis: Grammatical relations from Old to Early Modern English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Andrews, Avery D. 1976. The VP complement analysis in Modern Icelandic. North Eastern  Linguistic Society 6. 1–21.

Barðdal, Jóhanna. 2006. Construction-specific properties of syntactic subjects in Icelandic and German. Cognitive Linguistics 17(1). 39–106.

Barðdal, Jóhanna. 2023. Oblique subjects in Germanic: Their status, history and reconstruction. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 

Barðdal, Jóhanna, Eleonora Cattafi, Serena Danesi, Laura Bruno & Leonardo Biondo. 2023.  Non-nominative subjects in Latin and Ancient Greek: Applying the subject tests on Early Indo-European languages. Indogermanische Forschungen 128: 321–392.

Barðdal, Jóhanna, Leonid Kulikov, Roland Pooth & Peter Alexander Kerkhof. 2020. Oblique anticausatives: A morphosyntactic isogloss in Indo-European. Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 56(3): 413–449.

Barnes, Michael. 1986. Subject, nominative and oblique case in Faroese. Scripta Islandica 38: 3–35.

Bickel, Balthasar. 2004. The syntax of experiencers in the Himalayas. In Peri Bhaskararao & Karumuri V. Subbarao (eds.), Non-Nominative Subjects I, 77–111. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Castro Alves, Flavia de. 2018. Sujeito dativo em Canela [Dative subjects in Canela]. Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi: Ciências Humanas 13(2). 377–403.

Cluyse, Brian, Joren Somers & Jóhanna Barðdal. 2025. Latin placēre as an alternating Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat verb: A radically new analysis. Indogermanische Forschungen 130 (in press).

Hermon, Gabriella. 1985. Syntactic Modularity. Dordrecht: Foris.

Ilioaia, Mihaela. 2023. MIHI EST construction: An instance of non-canonical subject marking in Romanian. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Kachru, Yamuna, Braj B. Kachru & Tej K. Bhatia. 1976. The notion ‘Subject’: A note on Hindi-Urdu, Kashmiri and Punjabi. The Notion of Subject in South Asian Languages, ed. by M. K. Verma. Madison: University of Wisconsin. 

Keenan, Edward L. 1976. Towards a universal definition of subject. In Charles N. Li (ed.), Subject and Topic, 303–333. New York: Academic Press.

Landau, Idan. 2009. The locative syntax of experiencers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Masica, Colin P. 1976. Defining a linguistic area: South Asia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mathieu, Eric. 2006. Quirky subjects in Old French. Studia Linguistica 60(3): 282–312.

Moore, John & David M. Perlmutter. 2000. What Does it Take to Be a Dative Subject? Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 18: 373–416.

Pat-El, Na’ama. 2018. The diachrony of non-canonical subjects in Northwest Semitic. Non-canonical subjects: The Reykjavík-Eyjafjallajökull papers, ed. by Jóhanna Barðdal, Na’ama Pat-El & Stephen Mark Carey, 159–184. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 

Shibatani, Masayoshi. 1999. Dative Subject Constructions Twenty-Two Years Later. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 29(2): 45–76.

Somers, Joren. 2023. Oblieke subjecten in het Nederlands? De casus ‘wachten’. Nederlandse Taalkunde 28(3): 350–364.

Somers, Joren, Torsten Leuschner, Ludovic De Cuypere & Jóhanna Barðdal. 2025. A Corpus-based analysis of the Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat alternation in German. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 44 (in press).

Steever, Sanford B. (ed.). 1998. The Dravidian Languages. London: Routledge.

Thráinsson, Höskuldur. 1979. On Complementation in Icelandic. New York: Garland.

Verma, M. K. & K. P. Mohanan (eds.). 1990. Experiencer Subjects in South Asian Languages. Stanford: CSLI Publications.

Yoon, James H. 2004. Non-nominative (major) subjects and case stacking in Korean. Non-Nominative Subjects 2, ed. by Peri Bhaskararao & Karumuri Venkata Subbarao, 265–314. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.