We invite abstracts for 30-minute oral presentations, followed by 10 minutes of discussion, that address any aspect of Romance SE/SI constructions. We also plan on having a poster session. Submissions are limited to two per author, with at most one paper being single-authored. Contributions that address variation among different Romance languages or among different SE/SI constructions as well as those that address the questions below are of particular interest.
Call deadline: October 30th, 2015EXTENDED DEADLINE: November, 20th, 2015
Submit abstracts via: EasyAbs
Notification: December 11th, 2015
Abstract requirements: Abstracts, including references and data, should be limited to two single spaced pages (US Letter) with one inch margins, minimum font size 11pt (Times New Roman). Examples should be interspersed throughout the text. Abstracts must be submitted in PDF format through EasyAbs and must be received by October, 30th, 2015, 23:59EDT. The PDF file you submit must not include any information that reveals the identity of the author(s).
General Questions
Is variation across Romance languages in terms of number of SE/SI constructions tied to independent properties of the particular language? That is, are there clustering effects? If so, this would be reminiscent of a classic Principle and Parameters approach (Chomsky 1981) to variation, a situation becoming increasingly more difficult to find (cf. Baker 2008).
What is the role of being a null subject language? Belletti (1982) suggests that Impersonal (or Nominative) SE/SI constructions are available in Italian because Italian is a null subject language. Dobrovie-Sorin (1998) questions how tightly this correlation should be stated, since Romanian, a null subject language lacks Impersonal (or Nominative) SE/SI constructions. Are there properties of French Middle/Passive SE that result from French being a non-null subject language? And Brazilian Portuguese SE constructions, which are disappearing (Nunes 1990). Do they show properties that result from Brazilian Portuguese being a partial-null subject language?
To what extent are notions such as “case absorption” or “valency reduction” still useful in accounting for the properties of SE/SI constructions in modern syntactic theories? Do approaches that assign some aspectual function or a function related to event structure to SE/SI fare any better in elucidating a common core?
What is the nature of SE itself? A verbal inflectional morpheme (Cuervo 2003, 2014, Kempchinsky 2004, Folli & Harley 2005, Basilico 2010, Ordóñez & Treviño 2011, Armstrong 2013 among others)? A pronominal in argument position (Raposo & Uriagereka 1996, D’Alessandro 2007)? The result of a PF-repair strategy (Pujalte & Saab 2012, Saab 2014)? If it is a verbal morpheme which projection does it head? Does the morpho-syntactic status of SE/SI (verbal morpheme or pronoun) vary depending on the specific construction in which it appears? (Torrego 1995, Dobrovie-Sorin 2006).
More specific questions
What is the locus of variation in terms of allowing by-phrases in Impersonal (or Nominative) SE/SI and Passive/Middle (or Accusative) SE/SI constructions? Italian disallows them (Cinque 1988, D’Alessandro 2007), while Spanish allows some under not-so-clearly understood conditions (de Miguel 1992, Mendikoetxea 1999, Sánchez-López 2002). Canadian French differs from Continental French in licensing by-phrase as well (Authier & Reed 1996). Romanian allows them altogether (Cornilescu & Nicolae 2015)
Why is it that the sole DP in French Passive/Middle SE/SI can be 1st/2nd person, while it cannot in Spanish, Italian or Romanian (Cinque 1988, Kempchinsky 2006, D’Alessandro 2007, Mendikoetxea 2008, Cornilescu & Nicolae 2015)? What is the source of variation in this (lack of) person restriction?
What is the source of variation regarding the P(erson) C(ase) C(onstraint) in Aspectual SE/SI constructions? Rivero (2008) observes that some Spanish leísta dialects do not show PCC violations in Aspectual SE/SI constructions (see also Campanini & Schäfer 2011), while MacDonald (to appear) observes that some Spanish leísta dialects do show PCC violations in Aspectual SE/SI constructions.
What is the source of variation in Impersonal SE/SI constructions with respect to the clitic sequence se lo vs. se le vs. se la? Syntactic? Morphological? Many dialects of Spanish, even non-leísta dialects, disallow the clitic sequence se lo, but allow se le? (Mendikoetxea 1999). This variation is not limited to Spanish alone. As Mendikoetxea & Baytte (1990) observe, there is variation in a variety of Romance languages as well. How widespread is this variation?
Many SE/SI constructions have implicit arguments, typically agents or causers. What is the nature of these implicit arguments in Impersonal, Passive, Middle and Anticausative SE/SI constructions? Are they syntactically active? Do they project in the syntax?
Do Anticausatives marked with SE/SI have a particular interpretation that distinguishes them from unmarked Anticausatives across Romance languages? What is this interpretation and does it vary from language to language? (see Schäfer 2008)
Most Romance languages have what has been called Aspectual SE/SI (Nishida 1994, Zagona 1996), which typically appears with sets of transitive verbs and tends to have a telicizing effect. Additionally, it may also generate a special interpretation for those verbs with which it combines (De Cuyper 2006, Armstrong 2013). Do all Romance languages have Aspectual SE/SI? Does it appear with the same range of verbs in all Romance languages? If not, what is a potential source of any variation?
References
Armstrong, Grant. 2013. Agentive reflexive clitics and transitive se constructions in Spanish. Borealis. An international journal of Hispanic linguistics 2.2:81-128.
Authier, J.-Marc & Lisa Reed. 1996. On the Canadian French Middle. Linguistic Inquiry 27.3:513-523.
Baker, Mark. 2008. The macroparamters in a microparamtric world. In T. Biberauer (ed.) The limits of syntactic variation. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins. 351-374.
Basilico, David. 2010. The se clitic and its relationship to paths. Probus 22:271-302.
Belletti, Adriana. 1982. “Morphological” passive and pro-drop: The impersonal construction in Italian. Journal of Linguistic Research 2: 1-34.
Boeckx, Cedric. 2011. Approaching parameters from below. In A.M. DiSciullo & C. Boeckx (eds.) The Biolinguistics Enterprise: New perspectives on the evolution of the human language faculty, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 205-221.
Campanini, Cinzia & Florian Schäfer. 2011. Optional se-constructions in Romance: Syntactic encoding of conceptual information. Handout from talk given at GLOW 34 Vienna, Austria.
Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding: The Pisa Lectures. Holland: Foris Publications.
Cinque, Guglielmo. 1988. On si constructions the theory of arb. Linguistic Inquiry 19: 521-581.
Cornilescu, Alexandra & Alexandru Nicolae. 2015. The Grammaticalization of Passive Reflexive Constructions in Romanian. In G.P. Dindelegan, R. Zafiu, A. Dragomirescu, I. Nicula, A. Nicolae & L. Esher (eds) Diachronic Variation in Romanian. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
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Dobrovie-Sorin, Carmen. 2006. The se anaphor and its role in argument realization. In M. Everaert & H. van Riemsdijk (eds.) The Blackwell Companion to Syntax, v.4, 118-179. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
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Kempchinsky, Paula. 2004. Romance SE as an Aspectual Element, in J. Auger et al. (eds.) Contemporary Approaches to Romance Linguistics. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, John Benjamins, pp. 239-256.
Kempchinsky, Paula. 2006. Teasing apart the middle. In Itziar Laka & Beatriz Fernández (eds.) Andolin gogoan/Homenaje a Andolin Eguzkitza, University of the Basque Country Press, 532-547.
MacDonald, Jonathan E. to appear. A case of Multiple Agree: Accusative, not dative, se. Selected proceedings of the 42nd Linguistics Symposium on Romance Langauges (LSRL).
Mendikoetxea, Amaya. 1999. “Construcciones con se: Medias, Pasivas e Impersonales”. In Gramática Descriptiva de la Lengua Española, V. Demonte e I. Bosque (dirs.) Madrid. Espasa-Calpe, chapter 26
Mendikoetxea, Amaya. 2008. “Clitic impersonal constructions in Romance: Syntactic features and semantic interpretation”. In Impersonal Constructions in Grammatical Theory, A, Siewierska (ed.) Special Issue of the Transactions of the Philological Society, 106, 2, 290-336. Oxford: Blackwell.
Mendikoetxea, Amaya. 2012. Passives and se constructions. In J.I. Hualde et. al. (eds.) The Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics Oxford, UK: Blackwell, pp. 477-502.
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Ordóñez, Francisco & Esthela Treviño. 2011. Impersonals with Passive Morphology. In Luis A. Ortiz-López (ed) Selected Proceedings of the 13th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project, pp. 314-324.
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Nunes, Jairo. 1990. O famigerado se: uma análise sincrônica e diacrônica das construçôes com se apassivador e indeterminador. Masters Thesis, UNI-CAMP, Campinas
Pujalte, Mercedes & Adrés Saab. 2012. Syncretism as Pf-repair: The case of Se-insertion in Spanish. In M.C. Cuervo & Y. Roberge (eds.) The end of argument structure? Syntax and Semantics V 38. UK:Emerald Group, pp. 229-260.
Raposo, Eduardo & Juan. Uriagereka. 1996. Indefinite SE. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 14: 749-810.
Rivero, María Luisa. 2008. Oblique subjects and person restrictions in Spanish: A morphological approach. In R.D. Alessandro, S. Fischer, and G. Hrafnbjargarson (eds.) Agreement Restriction Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 215-250.
Saab, Andrés. 2014. Syntax or nothing: Some theoretical and empirical remarks on implicit arguments. Borealis: An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics 3.2:125-183.
Sánchez López, Cristina. 2002. Las construcciones con se. Estado de la cuestión. In C. Sánchez López (ed) Las construcciones con se, Madrid: Visor, pp. 13-142.
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Torrego, Esther. 1995. From argumental to non-argumental pronouns: Spanish doubled reflexives. Probus 7:221-241.
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