A workshop taking place April 8-9, 2020 at the University of Toronto

We regret that this workshop has been cancelled due to travel insecurities relating to COVID19

This workshop will feature talks about the morphosyntax of copular clauses, with special attention to agreement, which is particularly of interest in binominal clauses (e.g. ‘the winner is you’) where two nominals in the structure have the potential to control agreement. Agreement in binominal clauses is resolved differently across languages, and also across copular clause types (specificational, equative, identificational, etc). It is striking that agreement with the second NP (NP2) features as a prominent pattern. NP2 agreement is arguably non-canonical, occuring in structures where a higher nominative/absolutive is available, thus deviating from the standard expectation that the highest unmarked argument in a clause should control agreement. This raises numerous questions. To what extent is NP2 agreement a direct consequence of the syntax of copular clauses? To what extent does it arise indirectly via an interaction between copular clause syntax and independent properties (e.g. scrambling, pro-drop) of the languages in which it is observed? To what extent is it a consequence of the agreement procedure itself? What is the locus of the variation attested both between and within languages?

Invited Speakers

Jessica Coon (McGill University)

Marcel den Dikken (Hungarian Academy of Sciences)

Jutta Hartmann (Bielefeld University)

Caroline Heycock (University of Edinburgh)

Stefan Keine (University of Southern California)

Ur Shlonsky (University of Geneva)

Organizers

Susana Bejar (University of Toronto)

Arsalan Kahnemuyipour (University of Toronto)

Ivona Kucerova (McMaster University)

Registration is free, but we would appreciate it if those who are planning to attend would complete our registration form by March 31, 2020.

Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Grant #435-2013-1756)