Announcements

Conference "Typology of morphosyntactic parameters"

Center for modern linguistic research at Moscow State University for the Humanities is organizing a conference in theoretical and typological linguistics TYPOLOGY OF MORPHOSYNTACTIC PARAMETERS.

The conference will take place on December 5, 2011 at the Moscow State University for the Humanities (Sholokhov-University)
The opening is at 10.30 AM. [the conference room will be announced later].

The conference is addressed the issues of

• Word order typology and constraints on movement.
• Clitic typology.
• Argument structure.
• Case, Agreement, Head Marking, Dependent Marking.
• Syntax-Prosody interface.
• Polypredicative structures.
• Spell-out, ellipsis and zero categories.
• The correlation of morphosyntactic parameters and language types.

Format: 25 minutes for the presentation +10 minutes for the discussion

Organizing committee: Anton Zimmerling, Peter Arkadiev

The conference participants are leading Russian linguists representing research institutions and universities of Moscow and Saint Petersburg and specializing in the field of typological syntax and grammar theory.

Parametric approach to grammar is a rapidly growing branch in linguistic studies lying at the joint of Universal Grammar and linguistic typology. World’s languages can be described in terms of general parameters capable of taking different values. There exist ca. 7000 languages described to an uneven degree.  Linguistic typology deals with open classes of world’s languages sharing the same parametric combinations and aims at establishing types conforming to stable parametric combinations which predict the distribution of grammar features. Our conference is devoted to the interaction of morphological (Case, Agreement) and syntactic (sentence structure, constraints of wоrd order and external merger) аs well as to interlevel interfaces, specifically, to the syntax-prosody interface responsible for the correlation of the phonetic form and the syntactic output as well as for the segmentation of well-formed texts.