Foto: Juanito Ornelas

Invited speakers: 

- Ian Roberts (University of Cambridge)

- Mara Frascarelli (Roma Tre University)

- Maria Eugenia Duarte (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

- Michelle Sheehan (Anglia Ruskin University)

The purpose of the symposium is to bring together researchers who have conducted studies on subjects in Romance languages. We welcome papers that present and discuss new developments on this matter from any theoretical and methodological perspective as long as they focus on subject position. Questions to be addressed may include but are not limited to:

• In what way are the properties of subjects in Romance affected by different grammatical components (verbal inflection, agreement, case, pronominal system, word order etc)?
• In what syntactic positions are subjects realized in Romance languages? How do these positions relate to grammatical, semantic and informational features? To what extent do Romance languages differ among themselves in this respect?
• In what way have the studies on the pro-drop parameter increased our understanding of subject position in Romance languages? How have the investigations on subjects in Romance contributed to new theoretical developments and proposals on pro-drop typology?
• What interfaces between different levels (syntax, morphology, phonology, semantics, pragmatics etc.) may be relevant in attempting to explain general and/or particular properties of subject position in Romance languages
• What hypotheses can be explored to analyze sentences with impersonal and/or expletive (null or full) subjects in Romance languages? What grammatical and informational features are relevant to explain the distribution of definite and indefinite subjects?
• What contrasts between European and non-European varieties of Romance languages have been revealed with regard to subject position? How can these contrasts be accounted for from different theoretical perspectives?
• What do variation and change processes in Romance languages reveal us on particular and universal properties of subject position?
• How can language contact and/or second language acquisition trigger changes related to subject position? What do new varieties of Romance languages (for example, French, Portuguese and Spanish in African and American countries) reveals us about this issue?
• Which grammatical aspects related to subject position allow to oppose or approximate Romance to other language groups? How can such aspects be captured in terms of typological characterization?

Call for papers:

Abstracts are invited for 20-minute presentations (plus 10 minutes for discussion) and should be no more than two pages in length (including data, references, figures etc), 12 point-type. All margins should be at least one inch wide (2.5 cm). The file should be anonymous both in the body of the text and in the filename. Submissions are limited to a maximum of one individual and one joint abstract per author.

Abstracts should be submitted in PDF form via EasyAbs: http://linguistlist.org/easyabs/subrom2020

External Scientific Committee (324 Kb)

Contact: subjects.romance@su.se

Organizing committee: