Conference | Symposium
Information Structure and V2 syntax
- Date
- 21 June 2016
- Time
- Address
- Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- Room 030 (ground floor)
On the occasion of Marieke Meelen's thesis defence, there will be a symposium on Information Structure and V2 Syntax.
Programme
9.30-10.15 Marieke Meelen
Reconstructing V2 syntax in Welsh
In this talk I first show how the V2 orders developed by carefully reconstructing their syntactic history from earlier patterns with hanging topics and focussed cleft constructions in Old Welsh and related Celtic languages. I provide a syntactic reconstruction of the V2 structures with preverbal functional particles a and yd. These C-particles played a pivotal role in relative clauses as well and can be traced back to pronominal elements in Common Brythonic
10.15-11.00 David Willis
Patterns of marking long-distance wh-dependencies in Welsh
In this talk I examine resumptive and gap-strategy patterns of wh-dependencies (wh-questions, relative clauses) in Welsh and argue that Welsh has overt morphophonological reflexes of A´-movement via both the C-domain and Spec,vP. I will also consider the recent historical emergence and decay of these patterns and examine how they could have arisen.
11.00-11.15 Coffee break
11.15-12.00 Mélanie Jouitteau
Embedded T2 orders in Breton
I will present new microvariation data from Northern Breton dialects that show a wide array of embedded T2 orders. These are interesting because under current generalisations, they are supposed to be heavily ungrammatical. Breton is a Celtic "linear T2" language, that is a VSO language with an extra Tense-second requirement for at least a constituent, head or XP before the tensed element. Complementizer heads satisfy this requirement, predicting embedded word order to be uniformly C-VSO, which holds true for the Southern dialects of Breton (save some parataxe examples).
12.00-12.45 Susan Pintzuk
Information structure and syntactic change: cause and effect or orthogonal processes
In this talk I look at variation in object-verb versus verb-object order in Old English. I show that while information structure had a synchronic effect on the position of objects, preverbal vs. postverbal, the change from OV to VO progressed independently of information structure.
15.00 Thesis defence Marieke Meelen at the Academy Building
