(Non-)canonical passives

Workshop organized as part of the Annual Conference of the German  Linguistic Society (DGfS) to be held in Göttingen, Germany, February 23-25, 2011

Organizors: Artemis Alexiadou and Florian Schäfer (University of Stuttgart)

Accomodation: The local organizers provided this list of hotels in Göttingen.
A number of hotels have reserved rooms for participants of the DGfS conference. Should you choose to book a room at one of these hotels, use the keyword “Jahrestagung” in your reservation request. Please note that these rooms will only be kept free until January.

Programm

Call for Papers:

Non-canonical (NC) passives are constructions of the type in (1b), which crucially differ from their canonical counterparts in (1a) in the auxiliary used: in English get vs. be, cf. Haegeman (1985). In Standard German, kriegen/bekommen-passives instantiate NC passives. Unlike their English counterparts, they are licit mainly with ditransitives, Haider (1984), Reis (1985).

(1) a. John was killed in the war. b. John got killed in an accident.
(2) a. Ihm wurde/??Er kriegt geholfen. b. Er kriegt das Paket geschickt.
He-dat was/He got helped He got the parcel sent

NC passives have been reported for e.g. French (Washio 1993), Irish (Nolan 2001), Norwegian (Lødrup 1996), (dialects of) Dutch (Broekhuis & Cornips 1994), and Luxembourg German (Lenz in print). Such passives are often compared to the so-called adversative passives found in East Asian languages (Washio 1993, Huang 1999). NC passives have long been a puzzle for linguists who attempt to account for the differences between them and canonical passives, and to formulate a uniform syntactic theory of passivization, the issue being whether there is more than one way to 'go passive'.

In this workshop, we want to investigate the extent to which the key ingredients of canonical passivization (argument suppression, Case absorption, NP-movement) surface also in NC passivization.

The following questions will be further examined: i) the similarity between Asian and European NC passives and the delineation of the patterns that fall under NC passives; ii) the status of the auxiliaries in European NC passives and their grammaticalization paths; iii) the NC passive (verb-type and dialectal) distribution and restrictions; iv) the status of dative Case (is it a "structural case" or not?); v) the status of the participle in NC passives (eventive or adjectival, cf. Kratzer 2001).

We are interested in submissions that deal with the above issues from a variety of perspectives (typological, formal, synchronic, diachronic and experimental).

Keynote speakers

C.-T. James Huang (Harvard University)
Marie Labelle (Université du Québec à Montréal)

Abstracts
Please submit an anonymous abstract of two pages including examples, with 1'' margins and use no smaller than 12 point font. Send a pdf file to artemis@ifla.uni-stuttgart.de.

The subject of the message should specify 'Abstract', and the body should include the following information:
- Author's Name(s) and contact information
- Affiliation
- Title of the abstract
- E-mail address

Upon acceptance, authors will be asked to submit a named, camera- ready abstract. Accepted papers will be allotted 30 min. including discussion.

Submission Deadline: September 1, 2010
Notification of Acceptance: September 10, 2010