Reaction objects in English and Spanish

Monserrat Martínez Vázquez delivered a lecture on the syntax and semantics of reaction object constructions (Levin 1993) in English and Spanish. These structures include non-subcategorised objects which express a reaction which is realised by means of the verbal action (Pauline smiled her thanks = ‘Pauline expressed her thanks by smiling’). Fom Talmy (1985) it has been claimed in the literature that Spanish as well as other Romance languages, does not tolerate such fused constructions. Prof Martínez Vázquez has developed an analysis based on the CREA corpus (Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual) and offered examples which puts some of the previous claims into question.
CV: Montserrat Martínez Vázquez, Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University Pablo de Olavide in Seville, has held academic and research positions at different Universities (Harvard, Seville, Extremadura, Huelva and Pablo de Olavide). Her main area of research is the analysis of argument structure from a constructional perspective. She is coordinator of a research group on Contrastive Linguistics and has coordinated three linguistics projects funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology. She is editor of the three first volumes of Syntaxis. An International Journal of Syntactic Research and of a series of Working Papers in Linguistics published at the University of Huelva (Gramática contrastiva inglés-español, Gramática y pragmática, Transitivity revisited, Recent approaches to English grammar, Gramática de construcciones and The historical linguistics-cognitive linguistics interface). She is author of Sintaxis inglesa: la atribución (1991) and Diátesis: alternancias oracionales en la lengua inglesa (1998) (winner of the AEDEAN 1998 award for Studies in Linguistics). She has collaborated in the Diccionario sintáctico del verbo inglés (1996) and published articles and chapters in edited volumes on English grammar and English-Spanish contrastive linguistics. Her most recent publications concentrate on the analysis of different constructions from a contrastive perspective and on the metonymic basis of language.

2nd English Linguistics Circle postgraduate conference

The Second ELC International Postgraduate Conference on English Linguistics (ELC2) was held at the University of Vigo (Spain) on 30-31 October 2009. The objective of the conference was to provide linguistics postgraduate students with an opportunity to present and discuss their research in an informal and intellectually stimulating setting.
The conference was organised by postgraduate students from the English Departments of the Universities of Vigo and Santiago de Compostela. It was supported by these two universities and by the English Linguistics Circle, a research network involving the following research teams:
- Variation, Linguistic Change and Grammaticalisation (VLCG; University of Santiago de Compostela; Director: Prof. Teresa Fanego),
- Spoken English Research Team at the University of Santiago de Compostela (SPERTUS; University of Santiago de Compostela; Director: Ignacio Palacios Martínez),
- Language Variation and Textual Categorisation (LVTC; University of Vigo; Director: Javier Pérez Guerra),
- Methods and Materials for the Teaching and Acquisition of Foreign Languages (MMTAFL, University of Vigo; Director: Marta Dahlgren-Thorsell).
ELC2 was honoured to receive three internationally recognised plenary speakers: Terence Odlin, from Ohio State University, Geoff Thompson, from the University of Liverpool, and María José López-Couso, from the University of Santiago de Compostela.
The conference delegates came from many different universities, located both in Spain and elsewhere. There were speakers from the Spanish universities of Santiago de Compostela, Vigo, Seville, Pablo de Olavide in Seville, and the Balearic Islands; the international universities were represented by Hong Kong, Poitiers, Bamberg, Freiburg, Essex, the University of Maria Curie-Skłodowska in Lublin and the American universities of Michigan at Ann Arbor and Louisiana at Lafayette. The various papers covered a wide range of topics: morphology, syntax, phonetics, lexis, semantics, pragmatics, Discourse Analysis, Second Language Acquisition, and many others.
The English Linguistics Circle was also responsible for ELC1, a former edition of the International Postgraduate Conference on English Linguistics held in Santiago de Compostela in May 2008. A refereed volume containing a selection of the papers presented at ELC1 will be published as New trends and methodologies in applied English language research. Diachronic, diatopic and contrastive studies (Linguistic Insights Series; Bern: Peter Lang).

A workshop on the methods and applications of corpus linguistic research methods, by Douglas Biber

Prof Douglas Biber conducted a workshop on the methods and applications of corpus linguistic research methods.
CV: Prof Douglas Edward Biber is Regents' Professor at the English Department of Northern Arizona University. Previously he was appointed Assistant Professor at the Department of Linguistics in Southern California University. Prof Biber was visiting professor in Denmark, Japan, Chile, Germany, Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, severla Universities in the US, etc. He was the principal investigator in projects on the diachronic relations among speech-based and written registers in English and Spanish, on the computational tagging and grammatical analysis of the Longman/Lancaster English Language Corpus, and on the construction and grammatical tagging of the TOEFL 2000 Spoken and Written Academic Language Corpus and the T2K-SWAL Corpus to develop diagnostic tools for listening and reading texts. As far as his publications are concerned, he is the author or co-author of more than a dozen books and has written around 150 articles and book chapters. Prof Biber is well-known in the scientific community and also in our research group LVTC for his design of a multidimensional multifactorial model of linguistic variation.
Abstract of the workshop: The workshop began with a conceptual overview of the research methods and goals of corpus linguistics, illustrating the kinds of analysis that are conducted from this perspective, and the surprising findings that emerge from corpus-based research, with case studies taken from the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. These case studies further illustrate the unreliability of intuitions and the centrality of register for descriptions of language use. In the second part of the workshop, he turned to a discussion of the major types of research designs in corpus-based studies. This section of the workshop focused on discussion of the different types of observations and variables found in corpus-based studies, and how those design parameters constrain the types of research questions that can be asked in a study. (Similarly, these design parameters determine the statistical techniques that can be appropriately used.) Finally, Prof Biber turned to a hands-on introduction to publicly available web-based corpora and corpus-analysis tools. Specifically, two corpora were introduced – the British National Corpus (BNC) and the MICASE Corpus.

Constructs and constructions

Gert Webelhuth taught a seminar on "Sign-based Construction Grammar: an overview and application", by invitation of the LVTC research group, in which he introduced the philosophy underlying the constructional approaches and described Sign-based Construction Grammar.
CV: Gert Webelhuth is Professor of English linguistics at the Department of English in Göttingen. After completing an MA and a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Prof Webelhuth lectured in different institutions in the US, among others, UCLA, Maryland, Cornell, Wisconsin, Stanford and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He will soon be appointed as Full Professor of English linguistics at the University of Frankfurt. His research is focused on syntactic theory and analysis, in particular, the interface between syntax and semantics/discourse-text structure, predication, corpus linguistics, and psyco- and neurolinguistics. He is interested in the cognitive representation and the computation of linguistic form, meaning and use. Out of the list of his publications, let us mention his books Lexical and Constructional Aspects of Linguistic Explanation (1999, CSLI, co-edited by Jean-Pierre Koenig and Andreas Kathol), A Theory of Predicates (1998, Stanford: CSLI, co-authored by Farrell Ackerman), Government and Binding Theory and the Minimalist Program: Principles and Parameters in Syntactic Theory (1995, ed., Blackwell) and Principles and Parameters of Syntactic Saturation (1992, Oxford University Press).
Abstract of the seminar: Sign-based Construction Grammar (SBCG) is a new framework created at Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley. It combines the advantages of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar and Construction Grammar. The workshop presented an overview of SBCG without prerequisites and discuss its motivations as well as its relationship to transformational grammar. More information about the framework at http://lingo.stanford.edu/sag/papers/theo-syno.pdf.

Cartography of the English clause

Liliane Haegeman conducted the seminar “Cartography, intervention and the left periphery in English”, in which she paid attention to the revision of Rizzi’s cartography as well as to consequences which the placement of adverbials has for the syntax of the clause.
CV: Prof Liliane Haegeman completed her BA and PhD degrees at the University of Ghent. After that, she became Full Professor at the Universities of, first, Geneva and, later, Charles de Gaulle (Lile III). Currently, she is Full Profesor at the English Department in Ghent. Prof Haegeman has taught courses which cover, among others, topics in English and general linguistics, syntactic theory, comparative syntax and the syntax of Germanic languages. In her research she tries to couple empirical data and syntactic theory in such a way that the former can either corroborate or refute findings which have been favoured by the theory of grammar. Her investigation has been focused mainly on dialect variation (with special reference to English and West Flemish, which is her native language), agreement properties of conjunctions, sentential negation, the expression of the possessor relation and register-based variation (especially ellipsis). Currently she is interested in the analysis of the structure of the left egde of the clause and the syntax of adverbials and its implication for the functional articulation or the “cartography” of the sentence. Liliane Haegeman has written and edited a number of specialised volumes in Routledge, Blackwell, Cambridge University Press, Mouton de Gruyter, Kluwer, Longman, etc. She is the author of more than 100 articles and book chapters in prestigious journals and publishing houses. She belongs to the editorial committees of, among others, Linguistic Aktuell/Linguistics Today, Lingua, Syntax and Linguistic Inquiry.
Abstract of the seminar: Starting from the idea that all structure is formed according to the X-bar format it was shown that the simple clause structure in terms of CP-IP-VP is insufficient to capture the empirical data of English. The lectures focused on the CP layer and provided arguments for decomposing CP into an articulated hierarchy of functional projections which encoded concepts related to information structure/discourse anchoring. After a general presenation of the articulated CP as proposed in Rizzi (1997), additional evidence was provided from English to support the proposal. The cartographic approach to clause structure has elaborated a highly articulated template of projections in the CP domain. However, the status of the template in linguistic theory may be questioned. In particular the question arises whether, for instance, the sequence Topic> Focus does not follow direction from Information Structure, old information preceding new information. Alternatively, the sequence can be made to follow from an enriched theory of intervention (Abels 2008, Haegeman 2008). In this respect, the status of the lower topic, following Focus, raises interesting questions. It will be shown that the availability of the lower topic in some languages and its absence in others can be derived from intervention effects. Some clause types seem to have a reduced left periphery; adverbial clauses are a case in point. Two approaches to account for this reduced left periphery were examined, one closely cartographic which postulates that the relevant domains are reduced and lack a particular stretch of the CP-layer, another which explores a theory of intervention to derive the observed patterns.