Workshop in honour of Hans Obenauer

Programme du Séminaire Syntaxe et Sémantique

Workshop in honour of Hans-Georg Obenauer

Pouchet, 59 rue Pouchet, 75017, Salle de conférences (How to get to Pouchet : accès/ map)

See the page Archives Hans Obenauer for a list of Hans's publications.

Programme

Résumés/ Abstracts

Paola Crisma (U. of Trieste) &  Giuseppe Longobardi (U. of York)
The antisymmetry of Basque DPs
The internal syntax of DPs in Basque displays certain remarkable surface differences with that of IE and other Eurasian languages. However, they prove all reducible to a peculiar, though typologically expectable, combination of parameter settings well attested in other languages (e.g. Italian, French, Polish, Greek, Wolof, Hebrew/Arabic): given this parametric typology, the core structure of Basque DPs is exhaustively explained by crucially assuming an antisymmetric approach to DP syntax along with some interpretation of the labeling algorithm also independently suggested by certain constructions in other languages.

Hans-Martin Gaertner (Research Center for Linguistics, Budapest)
On Verbal Mood in Icelandic Conditionals
This talk deals with constraints on and consequences of indicative-to-subjunctive shift in the protases of Icelandic conditionals. Particular attention will be paid to V1-instances of the latter.

Jacopo Garzonio (U. Padua) & Cecilia Poletto (U. Frankfurt) 
Wh in situ in special elliptical questions
Elliptical questions display a considerable grade of variation, both in terms of syntactic properties and interpretation. In this talk we concentrate on a specific type of elliptical wh-questions in the Italo-Romance domain. More precisely, we deal with elliptical goal questions introduced by Ps like Italian per 'for' or a 'to', like Per fare cosa? 'In order to do what?'. We will show how these constructions are usually used as special questions. Furthermore we will discuss the wh in situ these clausal chunks display and its interaction with items encoding special questions across the Italo-Romance dialects."

Richard Kayne
(NYU) Some Thoughts on English Modal Need (abstract to be added)

Nicola Munaro (Ca' Foscari University of Venice)
Non-canonical questions and grammaticalization: the case of central Rhaeto-Romance pa
In this talk I offer a comparative survey of the distributional and interpretive properties of the adverbial particle po/pa across the Dolomitic region. By comparing the syntactic behaviour and the semantic contribution of this lexical item in different but closely related dialects, I try to better characterize the diachronic process of grammaticalization the Latin adverb post has undergone in the relevant geographical area, showing that its grammaticalization amounts essentially to successive upward reanalysis along the functional spine of the clausal hierarchy (cf. Roberts & Roussou 2003); in this particular case, the structural portion involved in the process corresponds to the highest functional projections identified by Cinque (1999). The discourse function performed by the particle in modern northern Veneto varieties might be the informational trigger towards its extension as non-canonical question marker (cf. Obenauer 2004) and as default canonical question marker in some central Rhaeto-Romance dialects.

Jean-Yves Pollock (professeur émérite, Paris Est Marne la vallée)
On French Que, Quoi, Ce que and clefts (abstract (pdf))

Organisation : Josef Bayer (U. Konstanz) & Patricia Cabredo Hofherr (UMR 7023 -SFL, CNRS & Paris 8)

Soutien : Nous remercions le soutien du laboratoire Structures formelles du langage (UMR 7023 - SFL CNRS & Paris 8).