Workshop ‘Expletiveness and Expressive Meaning’

This project aims at understanding which functional categories are predicted to be expletive in natural languages according to the hypothesis that, despite making no semantic contribution to linguistic meaning, they convey expressive meanings beyond grammar. Therefore, this project pursues an important theoretical contribution in connection to what can be considered an expletive category in Universal Grammar, grounded on the minimalist program on Generative Grammar, on formal semantics and on a Semantic Commitment model of the syntax-pragmatics interface. We aim to cover both synchronic and diachronic studies, which will foster our knowledge of what is a good candidate for an expletive category, and what are the potential changes that a linguistic item may have to undergo to change into an expletive item. The present project also has an experimental perspective by introducing elicitation work and corpus work. We will collect data in spoken and written modalities of natural languages by using a variety of psycholinguistic methods to investigate whether the presence of different types of expletives affects the processing of linguistic sequences. We also aim to understand the extent to which expletive items are optional and redundant both during comprehension and production. Corpora research, as we have previously done in relation to the emergence of verbal discourse markers in Spanish, will be done by accessing public corpora of the studied languages (e.g. CORPES XXI, CORDE, CICA, Davies corpora).

Provisional program

June 25

9:30-10h Welcoming
10-11h Daniel Gutzmann (Ruhr-Universität Bochum): tba
11-11:30h coffee break
11:30-12h Srabasti Dey (UAB): Uniqueness as a sufficient condition for predicate inversion
12-12:30h Sonia Cyrino (Universidade de Lisboa/Universidade Estadual de Campinas) and Susagna Tubau (UAB): On negative reduplication as an expressiveness phenomenon
12:30-13h Matteo Greco (IUSS-Pavia)
13-15h lunch time
15-15:30h Evripidis Tsiakmakis (University of the Basque Country): “And if I haven’t looked for expletive negation…!”: on Greek covert frequentatives?
15:30-16h Pau Francesch (UAB) and Cristina Real-Puigdollers (UAB):
16-16:30h pause
16:30-17:30h Eva-Maria Remberger (Universität Wien): Sardinian ello: Expletive or discourse marker?

June 26

10-11h Kim Groothuis (Universiteit Gent): Expletive pronouns between syntax and discourse: the view from Italo-Romance
11-11:30h coffee break
11:30-12h Clarissa Facchin (UAB): The functional structure of complementizerless clauses in Spanish
12-12:30h M.Teresa Espinal (UAB) and Natalia Jardón (UAB):
12:30-13h Daria Seres (University of Graz): A use-conditional item in the nominal domain: Russian discourse particle -to on nominal hosts
13-15h lunch time
15-15:30h Xavier Villalba (UAB): Expletive complementizers in exclamatives and beyond
15:30-16h Anna Kocher (Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt): [online]
16h Final remarks