Going Romance 2012 will be hosted Dec. 6-8 2012 in Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium (KULeuven)

Workshop (8 december) “Cleft sentences in Romance and Germanic”

Program: http://wwwling.arts.kuleuven.be/franitalco/gr2012/preprogram.pdf

Invited Speakers:

Christina Tortora (The Graduate Center, CUNY)

Clausal domains and clitic placement generalizations in Romance

Manuel Leonetti (Universidad de Alcalá)

Spanish VSX

Adriana Belletti (CISCL, Università degli Studi di Siena)

Focussing on Clefts

Going Romance is the European conference series that focuses on Romance languages from the perspective of current linguistic theorizing. In the two decades of its existence, it has developed into the major European discussion forum for theoretically relevant research on Romance languages where current ideas about language in general and about Romance languages in particular are discussed. This year, for the first time, the conference will be held in Belgium, at the KU Leuven.

The conference includes two days of general sessions, for which papers on all aspects and disciplines of Romance linguistics are invited, and a workshop “Cleft sentences in Romance and Germanic”. For the workshop, we invite contributions on cleft sentences in Romance, possibly, but not necessarily, in comparison with cleft sentences in Germanic. We explicitly welcome contributions from all types of theoretical frameworks. Questions to be addressed in the workshop include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Are there specific differences between cleft sentences in Romance and Germanic?
• Which are the prosodic, semantic, information structural and syntactic properties of non-prototypical instances of clefts, such as presentational clefts?
• To which extent do these non-prototypical instances of clefts challenge existing analyses of clefts, which are mostly based on it-clefts and their counterparts in other languages?
• Are clefts best analyzed by integrating information structure in syntax (as in cartographic analyses) or by strictly eparating information structure and syntax?

More info: http://wwwling.arts.kuleuven.be/franitalco/gr2012/index.html