Subject: cognitive, typological and functional approaches

Call for papers

Subject: cognitive, typological and functional approaches

Organized by the Linguistic Association of Finland in
Helsinki, September 12–13, 2013

The registration form is now open, see Registration. The deadline for registration and payment of registration fee is 15 August 2013.

Grammatical subject is a central notion in linguistic theories. Subjects have been studied across multiple theoretical frameworks, and defined from various perspectives, including, for example, feature-based (Keenan 1976), construction-based (Goldberg 1995), and cognitive-based (Langacker 2008). While there is no doubt that in many languages subjects constitute a core element of grammar, there is no general agreement on how to define them in and across languages, what conditions the way in which subjects are expressed, and what functions they have in discourse. Furthermore, there are numerous languages that lack the idea of a grammatical subject altogether, and the assignment of semantic roles to the constituents of discourse is conditioned by pragmatics and discourse structure.

The aim of this symposium of the Linguistic Association of Finland is to bring together linguists from different fields who work on subjects within cognitive, functional, typological, and interactional approaches. Contributions are expected to be data-driven, and the discussion of theoretical issues is appreciated to the extent that it helps to elucidate the data and remains accessible to linguists working within other theoretical approaches as well.

Invited speakers:

Possible topics for talks include (but are not restricted to) the following:

Abstract submission

Anonymous abstracts, no more than 500 words, excluding data and references, should be submitted by April 15, 2013 May 5, 2013. The abstracts must be anonymous. They will be evaluated by the organizing committee and by the members of the scientific committee. Notifications of acceptance will be announced by May 20, 2013 June 1, 2013. The talks will be 30 minutes long: 20 min for presentation and 10 min for discussion. In addition, there will be a poster section.

Please submit your abstract by: EasyAbs.

Proposals for workshops should be submitted no later than April 1, 2013. Workshop proposals will be evaluated by the organizing committee. Notification of acceptance will be given by April 8, 2013. The symposium organizers will provide the lecture rooms and other facilities, but the workshop organizers will be responsible for the organization of their workshops (such as choosing the speakers).

For all correspondence concerning the symposium, please contact: subject-2013@helsinki.fi.

References

Dryer, Matthew S. 2011.
Expression of pronominal subjects. – Matthew S. Dryer & Martin Haspelmath (eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Munich: Max Planck Digital Library. Chapter 101. Available online at http://wals.info/chapter/101.
Goldberg, Adele 1995.
Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Heine, Bernd & Song, Kyung-An 2011.
On the grammaticalization of personal pronouns. Journal of Linguistics 47: 587–630.
Keenan, Edward 1976.
Towards a universal definition of subject. – Charles N. Li (ed.), Subject and Topic. New York: Academic Press. 305–334.
Kibrik, Andrej A. 2011.
Reference in Discourse. Oxford / New York: Oxford University Press.
Langacker, Ronald W. 2008.
Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
LaPolla, Randy J. 1993.
Arguments against ‘subject’ and ‘direct object’ as viable concepts in Chinese. Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica 63 (4): 759–813.
Levin, Beth & Rappaport Hovav, Malka 2005.
Argument Realization. Research surveys in linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Li, Charles N. & Thompson, Sandra A. 1976.
Subject and topic: a new typology of language. – Charles N. Li (ed.), Subject and Topic. London / New York: Academic Press. 457–489.
Malchukov, Andrej & Ogawa, Akio 2011.
Towards a typology of impersonal constructions. A semantic map approach. – Malchukov, Andrej & Siewierska, Anna (eds.), Impersonal Constructions. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 17-54.
Posio, Pekka 2012.
Who are ‘we’ in spoken Peninsular Spanish and European Portuguese? Expression and reference of first person plural subject pronouns. Language Sciences 34 (3): 339–360.
Scheibman, Joanne 2002.
Point of View and Grammar: Structural Patterns of Subjectivity in American English Conversation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Seo, Seunghyun 2001.
The Frequency of Null Subject in Russian, Polish, Czech, Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian: An Analysis According to Morphosyntactic Environments. Doctoral dissertation, Indiana University.
Shibatani, Masayoshi 1977.
Grammatical relations and surface cases. Language 53: 789–809.
Shibatani, Masayoshi 1991.
Grammaticization of topic into subject. – Bernd Heine & Elizabeth Closs Traugott (eds.), Grammaticalization. Amsterdam: John Benjamins: 93–133.
Siewierska, Anna & Maria Papastathi 2011.
Third person plurals in the languages of Europe: typological and methodological issues. Linguistics 43 (2): 575–610.
Travis, Catherine E. & Torres Cacoullos, Rena 2012.
What do subject pronouns do in discourse? Cognitive, mechanical and constructional factors in variation. Cognitive Linguistics 23 (4): 711–748.
Van Valin, Robert D. and LaPolla, Randy J. 1997.
Syntax: Structure, Meaning, and Function. Cambridge textbooks in linguistics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Last changed 9 September 2013 / Tommi Nieminen