Workshop on Argument Realization in Asian Languages

 

 

July 21-26, 2008

Korea University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

 

A workshop on Argument Realization in Asian Languages will be held in conjunction with the 18th International Congress of Linguists (CIL 18).

                          

Organizer:

Henry Y. Chang,

Institute of Linguistics

Academia Sinica, Taiwan               

Email : [email protected]

 

 

Description

 

Although substantial progress in argument realization has been achieved within Indo-European languages (Levin 2005, Goldberg 2006, among others), it is relatively less known how semantic arguments realize in syntactic structures in Asian languages, most of which are typologically distinct from Indo-European languages. It also remains to be seen what impacts the findings from the study of Asian languages have on the theory of argument realization. This workshop aims to fill this gap by bringing together researchers who work on Asian languages (in particular, languages from Altaic, Austronesian, and Sino-Tibetan language family). The workshop will be focused on but not limited to the following issues:

 

·  What are the principles and constraints governing argument realization? Specifically, what role does the Thematic Hierarchy play in determining argument realization (Jackendoff 1990, Bresnan and Kanerva 1989, Grimshaw 1990, Van Valin and Lappola 1997, and others)?

·  How does argument realization vary across languages? How is the variation captured in principled way?

·  How are peripheral semantic arguments such as location, time, and beneficiary grammatically represented?

·  How are the causer and causee grammatically represented?

 

Selected References

Bresnan, Joan W. and Jonni Kanerva. 1989. Locative inversion in Chichewa: A case

study of factorization in grammar. Linguistic Inquiry 20: 1-50.

Goldberg, Adele E. 2006. Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in

language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Grimshaw, Jane. Argument structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.  

Jackendoff, Ray. 1990. Semantic structures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Levin, Beth, and Malka Rappaport Hovav. 2005. Argument realization. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Van Valin, Robert D. and Randy J. LaPolla. 1997. Syntax: Structures, meaning, and

function. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

Important Dates:

 

¡Ü August  31, 2007: Deadline for submitting the abstract.

¡Ü November 30, 2007: Notification of acceptance.

 

Form and submission of abstracts:

 

An abstract(.pdf or .doc file) should be up to 3 pages long, including data and references.

The abstract should start with the title of the paper, followed by the text of the abstract.

Please do not include the author's name in the abstract. On a separate page, please give

the author's name, affiliation, e-mail address, telephone number, mailing address, the paper title and the session number(title).

 

Please send the abstract and the author's information to both [email protected] and  [email protected].