Tagungen > Tagungsausschreibung

12.07.2013

The Interfaces of Adjective and Adverb in Romance and English

  • Ort: Graz, Österreich
  • Beginn: 05.06.14
  • Ende: 07.06.14
  • Disziplinen: Sprachwissenschaft
  • Sprachen: Sprachenübergreifend
  • Frist: 15.11.13

1) Conference description: In English and most Romance languages, attributes with adverbial function, i.e. modifiers of verbs, adjectives, adverbs or sentences, can have two different forms: the unmarked form of the adjective (as in (1)) and the adjective with an adverbial suffix (as in (2)) (Romance languages without such an adverbial affix are Rumanian and Sardinian).

 

(1)

a. Engl. The men work hard. [OEngl. hearde (adv.)]

b. Fr. Les hommes travaillent dur. 'The men work hard'

 

(2)

a. Engl. The men hardly work. 'The men work very little' [OEngl. heardlice (adv.)]

b. Fr. Les hommes travaillent durement. 'The men work hard'

 

The coexistence of underived and derived attributes can be observed with attributes modifying verbs, as in (1) and (2), but also with attributes modifying sentences, and with attributes modifying attributes. Additionally, some Romance languages display adverbial agreement: underived attributes that morphologically agree with a noun of the sentence although they do not modify this noun. The data in (3) show cases of adverbial agreement for attributes modifying adjectives and attributes modifying verbs.

 

(3)

a. It. Giovanna è tutta contenta. 'Giovanna is very glad'

Se ne vanno dritti in Paradiso. 'They are going straight to Paradise'

b. Pt. Ela é toda contente. 'She is very glad'

É muita bom. 'It is very good'

c. Sp. Estos chicos son medios tontos. 'These boys are quite stupid'

Vamos directos hacia el fracaso. 'We are heading straight to failure'

 

The above data raise several research questions concerning the interfaces of adjective and adverb in Romance and English. Topics for contributions could include, but are not limited to the following:

(i) Word class differentiation vs. word class flexibility

(ii) Restrictions on syntactic mobility of underived attributes

(iii) Semantic differences and shifts between derived and underived attributes

(iv) Adverbial agreement

The aim of the conference is to examine these topics from different perspectives such as linguistic variation, language change, oral and written tradition, standardization and linguistic norm, cross-linguistic comparison, …

A detailed thematic description of the conference (including more information on topics (i) to (iv) and references) is available at the conference webpage https://sites.google.com/site/rsgadjadv/ciaa2014

 

2) Call for papers:

Deadline for abstract submission: November 15, 2013 -- Notification of acceptance: December 15, 2013

We invite submissions for 30 min talks (plus 10 min for discussion) on topics related to the interfaces of adjective and adverb in Romance and English. We are especially interested in papers that present new data on the topics laid out in the conference description and papers relating the data with current linguistic theory in the domains of word class distinctions, language change, Sprachausbau, linguistic variation, oral and written language.

Abstracts must be anonymous and at most 2 pages in length including references and data in A4 or US letter format (12 pt Times New Roman, single-spaced). Abstracts should be submitted to https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ciaa2014 [in the field "Abstract" as a plain text file AND in the field "Upload paper" as a PDF file (.pdf)].

The language of the conference is English and all presentations will be held in English.

 

3) Invited speakers: Anne Abeillé (Université Paris 7) - Douglas Biber (Northern Arizona University) - Concepción Company Company (Universidad Autónoma de México) - Adam Ledgeway (University of Cambridge) - Davide Ricca (Università di Torino) - Salvador Valera Hernández (Universidad de Granada)

 

4) Organization and contact: Martin Hummel and Steffen Heidinger

Research Group "The Interfaces of Adjective and Adverb in Romance"

Department of Romance Philology - University of Graz / Austria

email: adjective.adverb@uni-graz.at

web: https://sites.google.com/site/rsgadjadv/ciaa2014

 

Von:  Steffen Heidinger

Publiziert von: LS