Final Call for Papers, extended deadline: 27th February 2015
Workshop on Copulas Across Languages: 18th and 19th June 2015
University of Greenwich, London
http://www.gre.ac.uk/copulas
Abstracts to: m.j.arche@gre.ac.uk
This workshop is about the semantic, syntactic and morphological properties of copulas across languages
Invited speakers:
Ely van Gelderen (University of Arizona)
Lisa Green (University of Massachusetts at Amherst)
Tonjes Veenstra (ZAS)
Meeting Description. Copulas are an area of the grammar where languages exhibit large variation. Some languages show no copula whatsoever in some instances, while other languages have four or five different copular forms. The type of variation is also diverse; in some languages the variation consists of contrasts between inflected/non-inflected forms (e.g., African American English, Green 2000), and others between different lexical copulas (e.g., Spanish, Arche 2006, Fábregas 2012; Irish, Doherty 1996; Bambara, Koopman 2003; Tibetan, Garrett 2001; Odia, Mahapatra 2002; Saramaccan, Veenstra 2012). The rules determining variation also differ. In some languages variation depends on the tense on the clause (Hebrew, Rapoport 1987; Arabic, Benmamoun 2000; Russian, Turkish, Wetzer 1996, Stassen 1997, Baker 2003; or Sakha, Baker & Vinokurova 2012); in others on the predicate type. As for their morphology, some copulas are verbal while others are described as pronominal (Rapoport 1991; van Gelderen 2011), and others have prepositions at their source (Pustet 2003).
Aims of the workshop:
- Discuss the syntax and semantics of copular variation across languages. What do copulas combine with and what do they mean in each instance?
- Discuss the relation of the copulas to TAME (tense, aspect, mood and evidentiality): How can we explain their absence in some tenses but presence in others? Why are specific copulas sometimes associated with specific evidential readings?
- Discuss the morphological incarnation of the copulas: pronominal in some languages, verbal in others...what does this variation tell us about what a copula is?
Illumination for these questions can come from:
1) The description of the morphology, semantics and syntactic distribution of different copulas in different languages and dialects and different acquisitional stages of languages.
2) The description of the diachronic development of the morphology, semantics and syntactic distribution of the copulas in different languages.
3) Qualitative or quantitative analysis of copula realization and variation using corpus-based methods.
CALL:
- We welcome abstracts for 30-minute presentations (plus 10 minutes for discussion).
- The language of the workshop is English.
- Abstracts exclusively containing the title of the presentation should be submitted to the conference address at
- m.j.arche@gre.ac.uk in pdf format.
- Abstracts should be no longer than two pages, including examples and references, with 2.5 cm margins in 12-point Times, single-spaced.
- Submissions are limited to one individual and one joint abstract per author
- Notification of acceptance: 30 March, 2015.
Scientific committee:
David Adger (Queen Mary, University of London)
María J. Arche (University of Greenwich)
Patricia Cabredo (CNRS – Université Paris 8)
Marcel den Dikken (CUNY Graduate Center)
Antonio Fábregas (University of Tromsø)
Angel Gallego (Autonomous University of Barcelona)
Edward Garrett (SOAS)
Berit Gehrke (CNRS-University of Paris VIII)
Ljudmila Geist (University of Stuttgart)
Elly van Gelderen (University of Arizona)
Lisa Green (University of Massachusetts at Amherst)
Rafael Marín (CNRS-University of Lille 3)
Louise McNally (University Pompeu Fabra)
Myriam Uribe-Etxebarria (University of the Basque Country)
Tim Stowell (University of California Los Angeles)
Tom Roeper (Univeristy of Massachusetts at Amherst)
Susan Rothstein (Bar-Ilan University)
Tonjes Veenstra (ZAS, Berlin)
