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Meeting Dates: 16-17 November, 2024 (In-person Meeting)
Venue: Ichigaya Campus, Nihon University, Tokyo, Japan
- Meeting Description
Predication is a relation between predicates and their subjects, or, more generally, arguments for which they select. Predication plays an important part in natural language syntax. Modification is a device enriching the information conveyed by a constituent, which is carried out by adding an element to that constituent (standardly via adjunction). Both predication and modification come in a wide variety of forms. Attempts to generalize over predication and modification face a number of important questions, e.g., about optionality, the category of the subject and the syntactic mechanism by which predicates and modifiers are related to their ‘significant others’. The division of labor between predication and modification is not always clear-cut: thus, depictive secondary predication and relativization appear to straddle the boundaries between predication and modification. Detailed investigations of the various constructions relevant to predication and modification enhance our understanding of natural-language syntax and its interface with meaning (both semantics and pragmatics).
Research questions to be addressed in the workshop include, but are not limited to:
1. What factors differentiate between predication and modification in syntactic terms?
2. Is it possible to reduce the distinction between predication and modification to some syntactically definable notions, such as complementation, specification, adjunction, dedicated (lexical/functional) heads?
3. Are there dedicated syntactic structures for predication and modification, and if so, what are they rooted in?
4. Do the syntactic structures assigned to predication and modification vary cross-linguistically, and if so, what underlies the variations?
5. Are there any diachronic data that tell us whether, and if so, how the syntax of predication and modification has evolved over time?
6. Are there any syntactic constructions that can be ambiguous between predication and modification, and if so, what underlies this ambiguity and how can it be diagnosed?
7. Are there distinct structural relations involved in modification, and if so, what determines their distribution and how can it be diagnosed?
This workshop will foster fruitful dialogue between researchers through analyses of a selection of construction types involving predication and modification, from a wide range of languages and analytical perspectives.
- Keynote Speakers:
Marcel den Dikken (Research Centre for Linguistics, Budapest)
“On the Syntactic Relationship between Modification and Predication”
Mamoru Saito (Notre Dame Seishin University)
“Language Variation and the Labeling of Modification Structures”
*IWSPM2024 is funded by JSPS Bilateral Research Program (JPJSBP120243802).
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