Syntactic expletives and (non-)compositionality

Workshop announcement

The Laboratoire de Linguistique de Nantes (LLING) will host a 2-day workshop on "Syntactic expletives and (non-)compositionality" at Nantes University on 23-24 May 2024.

Topic

The workshop is devoted to syntactic expletives in a broad sense, that is any morphosyntactically realized material that can be treated as semantically empty, or only weakly contentful. The talks will address the following questions, among others:

• What are some criteria for deciding if an element is semantically bleached/empty?
• How can varying degrees of semantic contentfulness be handled empirically and theoretically?
• How do models of the syntax/semantics interface that are canonically compositional accommodate syntactic elements that are not fully interpreted?

Invited speakers

• Elena Anagnostopoulou (University of Crete)
• Ash Asudeh (University of Rochester)
• Uli Sauerland (ZAS Berlin)
• Hedde Zeijlstra (University of Göttingen)

Program

Click here for the workshop program.

Venue

Nantes Université Campus Tertre
Room C248, bâtiment Censive (building #12 on this map)

Contact