My talk on Cartography of Light Verbs @ the Department of Linguistics at Geneva University

Chaired by Professor Eric Haeberi, head of the Department of Linguistics at Geneva University.  

  International Workshop on Syntactic Analyticity and Grammatical Parameters was held on June 20-21 at the Faculty of Linguistic Sciences of Beijing Language and Culture University.

General Information: The International Workshop on Syntactic Analyticity and Grammatical Parameters was held on June 20-21, 2018 in Beijing Language and Culture University. The thesis of the conference is “Syntactic Analyticity and Grammatical Parameters”. Nearly 50 linguists from China, Hong Kong, Macau, the US, Japan, UK and other countries attended the conference and presented their studies related to syntactic analyticity and language parameters from different perspectives.

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.