May 7, 2025 - May 9, 2025
The Colloquium on Generative Grammar (CGG) is an annual conference held in the Iberian peninsula since 1991. It provides a platform for linguists working in Generative grammar all over the world to come together and discuss current trends and topics in syntax, morphology, semantics, phonology and their interfaces. This year, CGG will be organized by the National University of Distance Education (UNED) in Madrid, Spain.
The 34th Colloquium on Generative Grammar (CGG34) will take place as an in-person meeting from May 7 to May 9, 2025 in Madrid. Apart from the main session, the Colloquium will also host a workshop on the prosody-syntax interface. We welcome submissions of unpublished work from any area of Generative Grammar both for the main session and for the workshop. Each paper presentation will be allotted 30 minutes plus 10 minutes for discussion. A limited number of abstracts will also be accepted for the poster sessions.
Invited Speakers
- Maria del Mar Vanrell Bosch, U. of Balearic Islands (UIB)
- Klaus Abels, University College London (UCL)
- Martina Wiltschko, ICREA/U. Pompeu Fabra
WORKSHOP
In the Generative Grammar tradition, the sound-meaning relation is mediated by syntax. This basic assumption is reflected in the minimalist model of the architecture of grammar (Chomsky 1995): a single generative component, the computational system (or narrow syntax), central to language, derives syntactic structures and feeds linguistic information to the external systems, namely, the articulatory-perceptual (or sensorimotor) and conceptual-intentional systems. To be able to ‘communicate’ with the external systems, two interface levels were postulated: Phonological Form (or simply PF) and Logical Form (or LF). Thus, interfaces play a crucial role in the process of communication between the generative/computational system and external systems. Ever since the Minimalist program, much work has been dedicated to defining precise mechanisms that map syntactic structures to the interface representations.
On the empirical side, the question of the division of labor between the computational system and the interfaces has led to reanalyzing certain phenomena that remained problematic for purely syntactic approaches: “… topic-focus and theme-rheme structures, figure-ground properties, effects of adjacency and linearity, and many others … seem to involve some additional level or levels internal to the phonological component.” (Chomsky 1995:220). Focus is, perhaps, one of the classical examples of such a reanalysis: from a purely phonological treatment of focus in Chomsky (1971), the relevance of focus for the interpretation was firmly established by Rooth (1992); then Rizzi (1997) made an influential syntactic proposal for the analysis of focus, and, finally, it was convincingly analyzed as an interface phenomenon (Reinhart 2006). Current research in the PF area is a serious and systematic exploration of the properties of the syntax-phonology interface (Truckenbrodt 2007).
The aim of this workshop is to focus on the PF interface, in particular, on the interaction of prosody, or prosodic features like intonation, stress, tone, etc., with the syntactic structure. The workshop will focus on cross-linguistic variation, particularly in Romance languages, including variation due to language contact and diachronic variation. Most of the recent work in this area has concentrated on the expression of focus and the location of the main prominence. However, other topics related to the syntax-prosody interface—such as the expression of interrogatives, exclamatives, clefts, and external phenomena like vocatives and parentheticals—are also worth exploring.
We, therefore, invite contributions on any area of the prosody-syntax interface in Romance, especially those whose empirical focus lies on underexplored languages and varieties.
Submission instructions:
• Abstracts should be written in English and not exceed two pages of text (A4), in 12-point font, single line spacing and 2.5cm margins, with examples and/or figures interspersed, and including references.
• Abstracts should be anonymous.
•. It should be explicitly indicated if the submission is intended for the main session or for the workshop.
• Submissions are limited to a maximum of one individual and one joint abstract, or two joint abstracts per author.
• Each paper accepted for presentation will be allotted 30 minutes plus 10 minutes for discussion
• Authors are asked to submit their anonymous abstracts as a PDF file to the following site: https://easyabs.linguistlist.org/submit/CGG34/
• If you do not have an account, please follow the instructions provided by the platform and create one.
Submissions open: Oct. 22, 2024 - Jan. 10, 2025
Abstract review period: Jan. 2, 2025 - Jan. 3, 2025