Submission Guidelines

Abstracts are invited for oral and/or poster presentation.

Abstracts must be anonymous and no longer than two pages, 12 pt single spaced in pdf format.

Possible Topics

• The rise of partitive cases, pronouns and determiners: origin of the development, grammaticalization, constructional change.
• Partitives and indefiniteness: Moravcsik (1978: 272) mentions among typical semantic correlates of partitives the definitness-indefinitness of the noun phrase. How does this function of partitives emerge, and how does it correlate with the morphological status of the partitive element (case marker vs. determiner, cf. Luraghi/Kittilä 2014: 20-27).
• What is the relation between partitive elements and other markers of NP indefiniteness, e.g. indefinite articles? Is the relation the same in different linguistic areas?
• How specific cases (genitives, ablatives, ...) develop into partitive markers and possible constrains on ensuing syncretism: what is the relation between the genitive, the partitive and the ablative in languages that feature distinct cases? Do other cases e.g. locatives, or other determiners e.g. the numeral one/indefinite article (see Budd 2014 on Oceanic languages) also develop into partitives?
• Partitive elements deriving from case markers (cases, adpositions) do not show the typical function of case markers to indicate grammatical relations (Moravcsik 1978, Luraghi 2003, Luraghi/Kittilä 2014 among others). How does this shift come about precisely?
• Contact induced change and the rise or loss of partitive elements as documented in historical varieties (e.g. Ibero-Romance, see Carlier/Lemiroy 2014)
• Dialectal variation, including field studies and documentation of vernacular and sub-standard varieties of poorly documented languages.
• The acquisition of partitives: bilingual speakers and learners. How are partitive elements acquired? Do bilingual speakers of languages that feature different types of partitive elements show interference in their use of partitive elements?

Committees

Scientific Committee

• Anna Cardinaletti, University “Ca’ Foscari”, Venice
• Michael Daniel, HSE, Moscow
• Giuliana Giusti, University “Ca’ Foscari”, Venice
• Riho Grünthal, University of Helsinki
• Tuomas Huumo, University of Turku
• Iván Igartua, University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz
• Tabea Ihsae, University of Geneva
• Silvia Luraghi, University of Pavia
• Petra Sleeman, University of Amsterdam
• Anne Tamm, Central European University, Budapest

Organizing committee

Silvia Luraghi, University of Pavia

Giovanna Albonico, University of Pavia

Petra Sleeman, University of Amsterdam

Invited Speakers

• Michael Daniel, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow
• Riho Grünthal, University of Helsinki

Venue

The conference will be held at the University of Pavia, Pavia (Italy)

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to Silvia Luraghi, University of Pavia, luraghi@unipv.it