Call for Papers
One of the central goals of syntactic typology is to reduce complex linguistic phenomena—and the often fine-grained variation they exhibit across languages—to a set of simpler underlying mechanisms. This enterprise involves deriving a wide range of syntactic constructions from constrained sets of features or other syntactic primitives that can combine in different constellations across languages. In this workshop, to be held at DGfS 2027 in Jena, we zoom in on these primitives and ask two interrelated questions: (i) To what extent are more complex phenomena in a given language determined by the presence of simpler ones, or by specific combinations of these elements? (ii) How much cross-linguistic variation can be accounted for through the parametrization of simpler elements?
On the one hand, we invite work on what particular combinations of features underlie larger syntactic phenomena. This line of argumentation is exemplified by Sichel's (2018) claim that exceptional extraction from some Hebrew relative clauses results from a conspiracy of features, namely when the clause both exhibits a particular derivational structure and occupies a particular position in the sentence. A similarly-flavored, long-standing debate concerns whether the availability of a correlative structure in a language can be predicted by its word order profile.
We also encourage work that takes as its focus a on how a small number of primitives and how they can expand parametrically to capture a range of syntactic variation in a factorial typology. Such an approach to a type of verbal inflection in the Algonquian language family is pursued by Oxford (2022), who argues that all and only the twelve patterns of inverse agreement attested in these languages can be captured through a parametrization of two agreement-related syntactic features. Similarly, Lohninger (2023) identifies subtypes of so-called “mixed” A/A'-behavior across languages and proposes that each can be represented through a constrained combination of syntactic features. Through such investigations, this workshop aims to shed new light on the small building blocks that form the basis of complex syntactic phenomena. For more information, visit the workshop website.
