Argument Structure
For the 21st Century
Participants
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Artemis Alexiadou
Artemis Alexiadou
Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Artemis Alexiadou is Vice Director of the Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS) and she heads the Research Area III ‘Syntax & Lexicon’. At the Institute for English and American Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin she holds the professorship for English Linguistics and is head of the research group Experimental Syntax and Heritage Languages.
Artemis Alexiadou researches the theory of syntax and morphology and cross-lingual variation.
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Gillian Ramchand
Gillian Ramchand
Gillian Ramchand is Professor in Linguistics at the University of Tromsø, and senior researcher at CASTL (Center for the Advanced Study of Theoretical Linguistics). She is interested in the syntax-semantics interface, especially with regard to verbal argument structure, tense, aspect and modality. The languages she have worked on include Scottish Gaelic, Bengali and English.
Gillian is also the leader of the RSN project Modal Concepts and Compositionality: New Directions in Experimental Semantics.
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Heidi Harley
Heidi Harley
Heidi Harley works as Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona in the Department of Linguistics. Besides the Linguistics Department, she is also part of the Cognitive Science program and the Second Language Acquisition and Teaching program. She works on syntax, morphology and lexical semantics, with a special interest in argument structure cross-linguistically. Together with Maria and Santos Leyva, she is investigating the grammar of the Hiaki (Yaqui) language, a Uto-Aztecan language spoken in Mexico and Arizona.
Mediator
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Cilene Rodrigues
Cilene Rodrigues
Cilene Rodrigues é Professora Assistente do Departamento de Letras da PUC-Rio. Atua nos cursos de Graduação em Letras e na Pós-Graduação em Estudos da Linguagem. Doutora em Linguística pela Universidade de Maryland, College Park, tem especialização em Sintaxe Teórica. Suas áreas de interesse são: Sintaxe e interfaces, gramática e processamento. É membro do LAPAL- PUC-Rio: Laboratório de Processamento e Aquisição da Linguagem (LAPAL).
Abstract →
Argument Structure
For the 21st Century
The study of Argument Structure has been a traditional subfield of modern linguistics, often associated with the lexicalist tradition. Does it survive as a coherent area of study 50 years on? What are its established results, and is it still relevant for linguists working within morphosyntax and semantics today? In this panel, we appraise our current understanding of this topic of research, focusing on crosslinguistic patterns and generalizations that support the conclusion that argument structure is hierarchically organized. Building on this, we will then discuss syntactically based approaches to argument-taking domains in connection with nominalizations, applicative and causative constructions.
Artemis Alexiadou (HU Berlin / ZAZ)
A lot of research on argument structure investigates the question to which extent verbal argument structure is parallel/inherited in nominalization. I will discuss how a syntactic view of nominalization tackles this issue, focusing on the relationship between the categorial nature of the head involved and the emergence of argument structure.
Gillian Ramchand (UiT)
To study argument structure is to study the relationships that sanction the combination of verbal and adjectival predicates to their nominal satellites, and hence is nothing less than a study of the heart of the compositional process itself. It turns out that over the past fifty years, we have discovered a lot about the glue that composes Verb descriptions with Noun descriptions in this sense. In this presentation, I summarize the generalizations that underpin this piece of the human language combinatoric system, and argue that they are both highly abstract and hierarchical. I will concentrate on the properties of the system that have attracted broad consensus in the literature, and I will attempt to lay them out in a manner that is independent of particular implementational choices or ideological commitments.
Heidi Harley (UA)
The project of understanding the productive composition of verbal argument structure must engage with the pervasive morphosyntactic phenomena which manipulate it, increasing (or decreasing) verbal valence. I will describe how the independently motivated development of a syntactic approach to argument composition opened the door to a syntactic view of morphological causatives and applicatives. The accounts of word and sentence formation thus developed led to the growth of theories of word formation powered by the same structure-building operations that drive sentence formation, and opened the door to new hypotheses about the building blocks of meaning and structure in the verb phrase.