Workshop on Syntactic expletives and (non-)compositionality

Date: 23-May-2024 - 24-May-2024
Location: Laboratoire de Linguistique de Nantes (LLING), Nantes Université, France
Contact: Jesse Tseng
Contact Email: [email protected]
Meeting URL: https://lling.univ-nantes.fr/fr/agenda-lling/syntactic-expletives-and-non-compositionality

Linguistic Field(s): Linguistic Theories; Semantics; Syntax

Meeting Description:

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)

Full program:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSFGovNM48ev90dgYfXvEwkBAQV8_rtfodVTgcAaVhPlhCZdLhrl0vuXYhncN7eGq8lrbVjEJH5ZPck/pub