There will be a workshop on “prominence-based agreement” during the conference, organized by Alex Alsina.

Workshop Program

Description:

The classical LFG approach to verb agreement has been to assume that each verb form lexically specifies the person, number and gender features of a particular grammatical function, typically the subject. However, facts from a variety of languages raise problems for this approach. In some languages, the grammatical function that agrees with the verb varies depending on the case features of the grammatical functions of the clause (e.g. Hindi and Icelandic); in other languages, the choice of agreeing grammatical function depends on the person features, and other discourse-related features, of the grammatical functions involved (e.g. Algonquian languages); in other languages, the features specified by the verb may correspond to semantic features, as opposed to syntactic features, of the relevant grammatical functions (e.g. Serbo-Croatian). The competition between different prominence scales (grammatical functions, case, person and number, etc) seems to be a crucial factor in determining the agreement trigger. This workshop aims to bring together descriptive and theoretical work on different languages that may shed light on new ways of analyzing agreement.

Confirmed participants:

Arsenijević, Boban
Belyaev, Oleg
Maling, Joan
Zaenen, Annie
Alsina, Alex
Vigo, Eugenio M.
Haude, Katharina
Jacques, Guillaume