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We are pleased to announce that the international workshop “What is a Word?” will be held in Zurich on 14-15 December 2017. The workshop is conceived as a platform for junior researchers (post-docs and PhD students) to discuss and present their own work. We hereby would like to invite junior researchers to submit papers and posters for the event.
Area of research: formal grammar, comparative linguistics (historical linguistics and typology).
The two-day workshop deals with the issue of wordhood in linguistics (esp. morphology, syntax, and phonology), approaching this allegedly basic notion from two different angles: formal grammar and comparative linguistics. The objective is to discuss, understand, identify, and define what governs the formation, the interpretation and the integration of words into the study of linguistic phenomena. In particular, it reviews various theoretical positions on this issue (e. g. in Nano-Syntax [Starke 2009, Caha 2009, Lander 2015], Distributed Morphology [Halle & Marantz 1993, Marantz 1997, Bobalijk 2015, Embick 2015] and related approaches [Leu 2015, Newell & al. 2017], in Word and Paradigm Morphology [Matthews 1972, Blevins 2016] and in Prosodic Phonology [Peperkamp 1997, Bickel & al. 2009]), and surveys language specific word phenomena across the world (e. g. Gijn & Zúñiga 2014), in order to highlight the advantages of each approach, but also to discuss their respective consequences for a shared definition of this notion in linguistics.
We welcome abstracts with both formal grammar and comparative linguistics backgrounds, concerned with any of the following topics (but not exclusively): (i) the notion of word as a derived notion; (ii) word phenomena at the interfaces of grammar (syntax-morphology, syntax-phonology, morphology-phonology etc.); (iii) the typology of wordhood; (iv) the history of the concept of word in pre-modern and early modern linguistic traditions.
Prof. Heather Newell (Université de Québec à Montréal)
Prof. James Blevins (University of Cambridge)
Prof. Tom Leu (Université de Québec à Montréal)
Prof. Götz Keydana (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen)
Dr. Eric Lander (Göteborgs Universitet)
Dr. Dieter Gunkel (University of Richmond)
The deadline for all abstracts is 15 September 2017. Notification of acceptance/rejection will be sent via email by 06 October 2017.
Abstracts concerned with any of the topics presented above are welcome. Abstracts should be no longer than two pages in length (incl. examples and references), in Times New Roman (12 pt letter type, single line spacing, 2,5 cm margins). Submissions are limited to a maximum of one individual and one joint abstract per author.
Each presentation will be allotted 30 minutes (20 minutes talk plus 10 minutes Q&A/discussion).
The official language of the workshop will be English.
Abstracts are submitted as a PDF-file to wordshop@linguistik.uzh.ch
Funding by the UZH Graduate Campus via a GRC Grant is gratefully acknowledged.
Bickel, B. & al. 2009. “The Distribution of Phonological Word Domains: A Probabilistic Typology”. In: Grijzenhout, J. & al. Phonological Domains: Universals and Deviations. Boston & Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. 47-75.
Blevins, J. P. 2016. Word and Paradigm Morphology. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.
Bobaljik, J. D. 2015. Distributed Morphology. Ms., University of Connecticut.
Caha, P. 2009. The Nanosyntax of Case. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Tromsø.
Embick, D. 2015. The Morpheme: A Theoretical Introduction. Boston & Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Gijn, R. van & F. Zúñiga. 2014. “Word and the Americanist perspective”. Morphology 24(3). 135-160.
Lander, E. 2015. The Nanosyntax of the Northwest Germanic Reinforced Demonstrative. Doctoral Dissertation, Ghent University.
Leu, T. 2015. The Architecture of Determiners. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.
Marantz, A. 1997. “No Escape from Syntax: Don’t Try Morphological Analysis in the Privacy of Your Own Lexicon”. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 4. 201-225.
Matthews, P. H. 1972. Inflectional Morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Newell, H. & al. 2017. The Structure of Words at the Interfaces. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.
Peperkamp, S. 1997. Prosodic words. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Amsterdam.
Starke, M. 2009. “Nanosyntax: A Short Primer to a New Approach to Language”. Nordlyd 36. 1-6.
