Agreement 2014: Defining and mapping agreement

Date: 31 July 2014
Location: King’s Manor, York, UK

Invited speakers:
Greville Corbett (Surrey), Jürg Fleischer (Marburg)

Abstracts:
No more than two A4 pages, in a size 12 Times font with 1-inch margins all around, including examples and references. Abstract submissions should be made through EasyAbs(http://linguistlist.org/easyabs/agreement2014) by 15 March 2014.

Presentations:
20 minutes in length with 10 minutes for questions and discussion.

Call for papers:
Agreement, in its simplest form, can be described as a situation where information associated with a 'controller' element also appears on another 'target' element. In many languages, agreement is pervasive, so much so that each of the major syntactic frameworks requires a way of dealing with it, either as a primitive operation such as Agree (as in Minimalism), or in terms of agreement, concord or index features (as in LFG and HPSG). However, despite extensive research, many aspects of agreement still remain deeply puzzling.

This workshop is devoted to a cross-disciplinary exploration of the agreement phenomenon, and the extent to which agreement may be defined in any given theory, as well as the ways in which agreement is expressed at the interfaces and/or mapped onto linguistic typologies. The workshop is not restricted to any particular theory or framework, and is open to any analysis that is firmly grounded in empirical data, which seeks to analyse agreement in morphology, syntax, semantics or its interfaces. Abstract submissions pertaining, but not limited, to the following questions are welcome:

1) What counts or does not count as agreement, e.g. agreement vs. concord, syntactic vs. semantic agreement etc.?

2) What can we learn from diachronic approaches to agreement in comparison with synchronic approaches?

3) What benefits or challenges do different methods of studying agreement present, e.g. fieldwork, corpus methods?

4) What is the nature of cross-linguistic variation of agreement, e.g. richness of agreement morphology, domains of agreement, syncretism etc.?

5) How can typologies of agreement be expressed, e.g. using a multidimensional approach such as 'Canonical Agreement' (Corbett 2002, Brown, Chumakina and Corbett 2012) as opposed to categorical approaches?

6) What role does morphology play in agreement and what types of frameworks are best suited to expressing this? What are the benefits of inferential-realizational frameworks (Stump 2001, Brown & Hippisley 2012) compared with e.g. Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993, 1994)?

Abstract submission:
http://linguistlist.org/easyabs/agreement2014

Workshop Information Page:
http://www.york.ac.uk/language/research/projects/ctia/agreement2014

Contact email:
yorkagreement2014@gmail.com