Lexical Restrictions on Grammatical Relations | SMART CS Workshop
The first workshop of SMART CS in 2021 will be held by Dr Eva van Lier, Dr Rik van Gijn, Dr Pegah Faghiri, and Katherine Walker. The workshop will also host keynote speakers Alena Witzlack-Makarevich (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and Gerrit Jan Kootstra (Radboud University Nijmegen), among other speakers.
“In many languages grammatical relations are to some extent lexically restricted, in the sense that certain verbs or verb classes take different argument coding frames than others. While such constraints are well studied for case marking, they have also been reported for grammatical relations defining other types of constructions, including a range of voice- and valency-related constructions and some clause-combining constructions. This online workshop aims to unite scholars from different (sub)disciplines, bringing together descriptive, comparative, corpus-based, and experimental studies, as well as studies that compare linguistic data with genetic and/or socio-historical evidence. Together, we hope to further our understanding why lexical restrictions should exist, how they are processed and acquired, and why/how/where they persist in languages.
Shedding light on these issues requires not only a cross-linguistic understanding of lexical restrictions in language use, but also thinking beyond the linguistic system proper. This includes addressing questions about the cognitive nature of lexical restrictions, e.g. about their role in language processing or language acquisition, but also about their cultural-historical behavior in different genealogical and areal contexts.
With this workshop, therefore, we aim to stimulate the conversation between different (sub)disciplines, bringing together descriptive, comparative, corpus-based, and experimental studies, as well as multi-disciplinary studies that compare linguistic data with genetic and/or socio-historical evidence.
Keynote speakers
- Gerrit Jan Kootstra (Radboud University Nijmegen)
- Alena Witzlack-Makarevich (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Program Information
The workshop will be fully online (via Zoom) and the program can be found here.