The workshop on the Grammar and Processing of Verbal
Arguments (Grammatik und Verarbeitung verbaler Argumente) hosted by the University of Leipzig,
Germany and organized by DFG, Research Unit “Grammar and processing of
Verbal arguments”, was held from 20th-21st April 2007. The invited
speakers were Judith Aissen from UC, Santa Cruz (Antipassive and Agent
Focus in Mayan), Denis Creissels from University of Lyon, France (Manding
argument structure), Gerrit Dimmendaal from Köln University, Germany
(Marked Nominatives in Eastern Sudanic: Explaining a ''typological
oddity''), Helen de Hoop from Radboud University, Nijmegen (Animacy and
subjecthood),William McGregor from University of Århus, (Optional
ergativity), Andrew Nevins from Harvard University (Disappearance of the
marked: first person in Kadiwéu), Maaike Schoorlemmer from Utrecht
Institute of Linguistics (Internal argument licensing in nominalization),
Luka Szucsich from Berlin (Argument Coding, Binding, and Syntactic
Dependencies), Dieter Wunderlich, Berlin (The emergence of argument
linking types).
The two day workshop involved four sessions on each day and about 18
talks/ presentations from 9am-7pm. Apart from the invited speakers and
participants from other parts of the world, students and faculty members
from the University of Leipzig (Department of Linguistics) and Max Planck
Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Max Planck Institute for Human
Cognitive and Brain Sciences also participated in the workshop. Each talk
was for 1 hour followed by 15 minutes of discussions.
The papers presented centred around aspects of verbal arguments from
different theoretical perspectives of different linguistic fields such as
syntax, typology, pycholinguistics and morphology. The papers dealt with
various topics such as antipassive, topic/ focus, ditransitive/
transitive/ intransitive constructions, causatives, argument encoding,
argument linking variables of arguments marking, ergative case system,
nominalisation, case markedness, animacy and subjecthood.
The languages focused during the discussions in the workshop included
Mayan, German, Kambera, Tlapane, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi,
Turkish, Icelandic, Sudanic, Slavic, Kadiweu, Tiwa, Bambara, and others.
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