International Argument Alternation Workshop
July 16 and July 17, 2025
Kobe University
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Meeting Description
Meeting Description
The International Argument Alternation Workshop (IAAW) will be held in person in Kobe City, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, on July 16 and July 17, 2025, hosted by the Graduate School of Humanities, Kobe University.
“Argument alternations” are phenomena in which a set of (or one of the) arguments of the verb have alternative realizations (in terms of grammatical relations, case marking, etc.) (e.g., Dowty 2000; Levin and Rappaport Hovav 2005). English has a wide range of argument alternations. Some representative ones include causative/inchoative alternation (e.g., The boy broke the dish/The dish broke), locative alternation (e.g., John loaded hay onto the truck/John loaded the truck with hay), and dative alternation (e.g., Chris gave Kim a book/Chris gave a book to Kim), among many others (Levin 1993).
Argument alternations have been studied by applying a diverse range of theories, methods, and approaches: cognitive linguistics (e.g., Law 2022), corpus linguistics (e.g., Gries and Stefanowitsch 2004), Construction Grammar (e.g., Goldberg 1995), Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (e.g., Davis, Koenig and Wechsler 2021), Generative Grammar (e.g., Baker 1988), Lexical-Functional Grammar (e.g., Bresnan and Kanerva 1989), Role and Reference Grammar (e.g., Van Valin 2007), and typology (e.g., Malchukov 2015), to name a few.
The workshop aims to serve as a platform encouraging cross-theoretical discussions on argument alternations, bringing together researchers with different backgrounds. We invite papers that discuss new data or new generalizations of argument alternations—they can be argument alternation patterns from understudied languages or microvariations of already well-studied alternations (verb A alternates but verb B does not, yet both verbs belong to the same category), or papers that highlight some fresh data on well- or less-known argument alternations and discuss them in light of a newly developed component of the theory or under a new perspective.
We welcome papers dealing with any types/aspects of argument alternations (e.g., swarm alternation, passive, possessor raising, noun incorporation, differential subject/object marking). We are particularly interested in research on less-known types (e.g., Kishimoto 2024).
Possible research questions include (but are not limited to):
1. Are there any differences in the encoded lexical meanings between the alternants?
2. How are the morphological codings motivated in argument alternations? Are they unique to the alternations or found elsewhere?
3. Are alternations driven syntactically or semantically? What is the evidence for the division?
4. Are there microvariations or speaker variations in alternation patterns? How are they motivated?
5. What do diachronic data tell us about the changes involved in argument alternations?
6. Can a metaphor improve the acceptability of an alternating pattern (cf. Salkoff 1983)? If so, why?
7. Are multiple argument alternations possible with a single verb? What factors trigger them?
8. What is the possible range of the (micro-)variations in argument alternations? What is their motivation?
9. Are there any grammatical contexts in which one alternant is possible, while the other is not? Why?
10. What semantic classes of predicates show the same alternation patterns?
11. Are there any grammatical operations that make argument alternations possible?
Invited Speakers
Invited Speakers
Delia Bentley (The University of Manchester)
Caroline Heycock (The University of Edinburgh)
Call for Papers - Closed
Call for Papers - Closed
Submissions are invited for 20-minute oral presentations (+10 min. Q&A).
Please submit an anonymous one-page abstract, not exceeding (and very close to) 500 words, including examples (references and tables/figures may be on the second page), by December 31, 2024 January 5, 2025, 10 AM JST (UTC +9) in PDF format, via EasyAbs system on the Linguist List. Please add the 'word count' at the end of the abstract. (Please ensure that your PDF's document properties show no author name.)
Please use a few representative words from the title as the filename (e.g., locative_clear_verbs_korean.pdf) to maintain the file’s anonymity.
Authors may submit one individual and/or one co-authored abstract.
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FYI: This is an in-person only meeting with no online component.
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Important dates:
Abstract submission: November 1, 2024 - December 31, 2024 January 5, 2025, 10 AM Japan Standard Time (UTC +9) (deadline extended) ---Thank you for your submission. Abstrac submission is now closed.
Notification of acceptance: January 31, 2025
Workshop dates: July 16 and 17, 2025
(Note: The Linguist List shows the workshop dates are July 20-21 but these are the old dates associated with the first CFP. The updated and correct workshop dates are July 16 and 17, 2025.)
Scientific Committee
Scientific Committee
John Beavers (The University of Texas, Austin)
Hideki Kishimoto (Kobe University)
Jean-Pierre Koenig (University at Buffalo)
Andrej Malchukov (University of Mainz)
Gillian Ramchand (UiT The Arctic University of Norway)
Robert D. Van Valin, Jr. (University at Buffalo/ Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf)
Stephen Wechsler (The University of Texas, Austin)
Michael Wilson (University of Delaware)
Workshop Organizers & Contact
Workshop Organizers & Contact
-Hideki Kishimoto (Kobe University)
-Kiyoko Toratani (York University)
-Prashant Pardeshi (National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics)
For questions, please contact: iaaw.kobe2025@ gmail.com (remove the extra space after the [at] mark)
Announcement
Announcement
Graduate School of Humanities, Kobe University, will consecutively host two independent international meetings. IAAW (July 16-17, 2025) will take place immediately after The 18th International Conference on Role and Reference Grammar (RRG2025) (July 14-15, 2025).
Sponsors
Sponsors
-Kobe University
-York University
-National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics
Supporting organizations
References
References
Baker, Mark. 1988. Incorporation: A Theory of Grammatical Function Changing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bresnan, Joan, and Jonni M. Kanerva. 1989. Locative inversion in Chicheŵa: A case study of factorization in grammar. Linguistic Inquiry 20(1): 1–50.
Davis, Anthony R., Jean-Pierre Koenig and Stephen Wechsler. 2021. Argument structure and linking. In Stefan Müller, Anne Abeillé, Robert D. Borsley, and Jean-Pierre Koenig (eds.), Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar: The Handbook, 315-367. Berlin: Language Science Press. https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/259
Dowty, David. 2001. The semantic asymmetry of ‘argument alternations’ (and why it matters). GAGL: Groninger Arbeiten zur Germanistischen Linguistik 44: 171–186.
Goldberg, A. 1995. Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gries, Stefan Th, and Anatol Stefanowitsch. 2004. Extending collostructional analysis: A corpus-based perspective on “alternations.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9(1): 97–129.
Kishimoto, Hideki. 2024. Revisiting locative alternations: Argument alternations based on polysemy and coercion. In Hideki Kishimoto, Toshio Hidaka, and Kazuya Kudo (eds.), Lexicon and Semantics-Syntax Interaction. Tokyo: Kaitakusha.
Law, James. 2022. Metonymy and argument alternations in French communication frames. Cognitive linguistics 33(2): 387–413.
Levin, Beth. 1993. English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Levin, Beth and Malka Rappaport Hovav. 2005. Argument Realization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511610479.001
Malchukov, Andrej. 2015. Valency classes and alternations: Parameters of variation. In Andrej Malchukov and Bernard Comrie (eds.), Valency Classes in the World’s Languages, Volume 1. Introducing the Framework, and Case Studies from Africa and Eurasia, 73–130. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110338812
Salkoff, Morris. 1983. The bees are swarming in the garden: a systematic synchronic study of productivity. Language 59(2): 288–346.
Van Valin, Robert D. Jr. 2007. The Role and Reference Grammar analysis of three-place predicates. Suvremena Lingvistika 33.1(63), 31–64. https://hrcak.srce.hr/19458
Website for IAAW: https://sites.google.com/view/iaaw2025/home
Website for RRG2025: https://sites.google.com/view/rrg2025/home
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