June 19, 2025 - June 20, 2025
https://adamson52.wixsite.com/zas-clausal-compleme
The Leibniz-Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS) in Berlin is pleased to announce a workshop to be held June 19th-20th, 2025, generously supported in part by the van Riemsdijk Foundation (VRF), with the title Clausal Complementation Across Categories.
This workshop focuses on the relationship between clause-embedding attitude predicates and the clauses with which they combine, with special attention paid to how the syntax and semantics of clausal embedding interacts with either the category of the predicate (i.e. as a verb, noun, or adjective) or of the clause (i.e. as nominalized, nonfinite, etc.). Discussion of these topics will further advance our understanding of the fundamental components of clausal embedding, attitude descriptions, and the interfaces between (morpho)syntax and semantics.
The topic of clausal embedding has garnered a great deal of attention especially in recent literature, spanning areas from complement clause size (e.g. Wurmbrand and Lohninger 2023); composition with and movement of clauses (e.g. Moulton 2015); embedded main clause phenomena (e.g. Woods and Wolfe 2020); factivity inferences and alternations (e.g. Djärv 2019, Bondarenko 2020, Degen and Tonhauser 2022); the effects of prosodic focus (e.g. Simons et al 2017); to selectional restrictions for declaratives vs. questions (e.g. Roberts 2019, Djärv 2023).
A core topic in the study of clause-embedding that this workshop aims to highlight concerns the extent to which it either resembles or diverges from complementation with nominal arguments, and what the consequences are for i) how a predicate’s selectional properties are encoded and interact with the neighboring syntacticosemantic environment; and ii) how clauses combine both syntactically (e.g. as complements, as adjuncts, potentially moving) and semantically (e.g. via function application, predicate modification, or “restrict” in Chung and Ladusaw’s 2004 sense). An articulated theory of clausal embedding, for example, should be able to account for the fact that in English, verbal believe permits expressions like believe that it’s raining and believe the claim whereas nominal belief allows the belief that it’s raining but not *the belief of the claim (see e.g. Moulton 2015), and should also be able to contend with related clausal embedding facts across different languages.
The linguistic properties of the clauses that combine with attitude predicates have also been subject to extensive research from different perspectives. More recent research in the syntax and semantics of dependent clauses has asked whether clauses are all underlyingly nominal, in contrast to earlier research where that-type clauses were proposed to exhibit a low degree of “nouniness” (cf. Ross 1973): to what extent are (different) clauses nominal-like, and how is this manifested in the presence of nominal projections or individual-type interpretation? In particular, the presence of different types of clausal nominalizations across languages, and their interactions with other semantic and syntactic properties, raises a host of questions regarding the nominal analysis of clauses (cf. Kastner 2015).
The workshop welcomes presentations that address the following questions:
• Are clause-taking and nominal-taking properties of a predicate preserved across its verbal, adjectival, and/or nominal incarnations? What accounts for shared and/or divergent behavior across categories?
• Does the interpretation of a nominalized predicate (or some other type of derived form) correlate with its clause-taking properties?
• What is the manner of composition of a clause (e.g. syntactic complementation vs. adjunction; semantic saturation vs. predicate modification vs. “restrict”) and how does this change depending on the category of the predicate? Does the clause move with one category but not another? Do clauses combine with adjectives in the same manner as with verbs or nouns?
• To what extent can a uniform analysis of embedded clauses as nominal formations account for the overall distributional properties of embedded clauses?
• How and why is the category of the complement affected by the category of the clause-taking predicate (e.g. nouns can’t occur with so anaphora; specific prepositions with PPs)?
• What are the implicational and entailment patterns between verbs like claim (that p) and their corresponding “light verb” constructions like make the claim (that p)?
• How does modulating argument- and/or event-structure affect clausal interpretation and/or complementation patterns?
• What is the role of complementizers in the composition of a clause-taking predicate with a clause and how does this change across categories?
• What is the role of determiners (and/or pronominal correlates) that occur with clauses, and how does this affect or reflect nominal/clausal properties?
• What role does finiteness play in the distribution of clauses in both the verbal and nominal domains?
The workshop will bring together researchers whose work has engaged with category-related questions about clausal complementation in different languages, and will encourage and facilitate discussion between researchers working on these topics.
Submission instructions:
Abstracts should be submitted via EasyAbs through the link at the bottom of this page.
Abstracts, including (select) references and data, must not exceed two pages with 1 inch (2.54cm) margins on all sides. Font must be set in Times New Roman (or equivalent) with a font size no smaller than 12pt. Font size in displays and references may be smaller. The submission must be anonymous and not reveal the identity of the author(s) in any way.
All submissions will be considered for oral presentation at the workshop. An author may submit a maximum of two abstracts, only one of which may be single-authored.
Submission deadline: March 14, 2025 23:59 Berlin time (GMT +01:00)
Notification of acceptance: April
Should you encounter any issues, please write us an email at the address: adamson at leibniz-zas dot de
Submissions open: Jan. 15, 2025 - March 14, 2025
Abstract review period: March 15, 2025 - April 3, 2025
Contact Email: [email protected]