International Workshop on Syntactic Analyticity and Grammatical Parameters
（Call for papers）
General Information: The International Workshop on Syntactic Analyticity and Grammatical Parameters will be held on June 20-21, 2018 in Beijing Language and Culture University. The thesis of the conference is “Syntactic Analyticity and Grammatical Parameters”. All linguists who are interested in the studies related to the thesis are welcome to submit their abstracts following the instructions below. The following are some suggested topics: the nature of the syntactic analyticity, the relation and differences between syntactic analyticity and synthesis, syntactic studies on non-analytic languages such as Western African Languages and Austronesian Languages, different parametric settings among Chinese dialects, the historical development of analyticity and synthesis in Chinese history, etc. We encourage participants to present their studies under different perspectives, including but not limited to syntactic cartographic approach.
Background: Traditional typological works in linguistics dating back to Sapir (1921) and earlier and continued in Greenberg (1963) and much current work have looked at languages beyond the language-family borders and arrived at important typological generalizations (SVO vs. SOV, analytic vs. synthetic, inflectional vs. agglutinative, etc.). In formal (generative) linguistics have also approached linguistic variation, but from a principles-and-parameters approach, with important results that have helped to understand not only the nature of language variation but also how language is acquired effortlessly by children under a condition of poverty of the stimulus. Many parameters have been proposed in the generative tradition (the head-parameter, the pro-drop parameter, head-movement parameter, the nominal-mapping parameter, wh-movement parameter, the non-configurationality parameter, etc.) In recent years many researchers have turned their attention to micro-parameters, and relationship between macro- and micro-parameters. Among them, some researchers (Baker 2008, Huang 2015, for example) have emphasized that while the micro-parameters point to actual points of variation that are acquired, the more abstract macro-parameters do represent important typological patterns that should not be ignored. Huang (2015) and Huang and Roberts (2017）further argue that many parameters that have been proposed may be seen as special cases of an Analytic-Synthetic mega-parameter that was recognized in traditional research. Based on comparative work between Modern Chinese, Old Chinese, English and other languages, Huang (2015) shows that many familiar properties of Modern Chinese (the extensive use of light verbs, pseudo-incorporation, verbal atelicity, classifiers, localizers, lack of wh-movement, lack of post-verbal nobody, etc.) can all be seen as manifestations of it being a highly analytic language, while the lack of these properties probably characterize Old Chinese and English as fairly synthetic languages.
To promote the studies in this tradition, we organize the International Workshop on Syntactic Analyticity and Grammatical Parameters and welcome all the scholars who are interested in the similar topics to participate.
In addition to the thesis above, we also encourage submissions of papers with theoretical and methodological innovation, studies on analyticity-synthesis from syntactic cartographic perspective in particular (but not limited to it).
Details:
Thesis：Syntactic Analyticity and Grammatical Parameters
Time: June 20th-21st
Location: Beijing Language and Culture University
Deadline of abstract submission: April 6th, 2018
Date of announcement of acceptance: April 20th, 2018
Language: English; Mandarin Chinese
Abstract Submission Description:
1. Abstracts are limited to one page (using 1 inch margins on all sides), including examples and (selected) references.
2. Abstracts can be written in English or Chinese:
For English: Please use standard Times New Roman font, size 12 pt
For Chinese: Please use Song(宋体)font, size 12 pt
3. Abstracts should be sent as DOC file, but if your abstract contains trees or special symbols, please send us both Doc and PDF files.
4. Abstracts should be anonymous, but please do write down the title of your paper with your contact information and send it to our conference email: wudaokoulinguists@126.com.
5. We only accept abstract submission through easychair, the following is the link of abstract submission page of the conference at the easyabstracts:
6. Please following format to name your abstracts: (1) for the abstract with single author: Name.doc or Name.pdf, e.g.: abstract submitted by Wang Mian: Wangmian.doc or Wangmian.pdf; (2) for the abstract with more authors: Name_co.doc or Name_co.pdf; e.g.: Wang Mian and other co-authors: Wangmian_co.doc or Wangmian_co.pdf.