CRISSP is proud to present the tenth instalment of the Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics (BCGL), devoted to the morphology and semantics of person and number.

BCGL 10: The Morphology and Semantics of Person and Number
Brussels, December 4-5, 2017.

Invited speakers

• Matthew Baerman (University of Surrey)
• Daniel Harbour (Queen Mary University of London)
• Martina Wiltschko (The University of British Columbia)

Workshop description

Person (in pronominal elements such as independent pronouns, pronominal clitics and affixes and agreement markers) is often believed to be a universal morphosynctactic category in language, which shows great variation in its morphology (Forchheimer 1953; Siewierska 2004; Cysouw 2003). This can be seen in for example the different syncretism patterns that exist between the individual persons and across the numbers. Many accounts of person and number paradigms aim to explain these syncretism patterns by giving a feature-based analysis, such as a.o. Harley & Ritter (2002); Baerman et al. (2005); Bobaljik (2008); Harbour (2016); Ackema & Neeleman (2017). Person and number also show variation in the morphological composition of the individual pronominal elements, in some cases resulting in a markedness hierarchy (Zwicky 1977; Corbett 2000; Moskal 2014; Smith et al. 2016). Consider for example the fact that the morphological form for the inclusive can properly contain that of the exclusive and also vice versa. In this case, there appears to be no morphological markedness relation. However, for number, the plural can contain the morpheme for singular but not vice versa (e.g. Daniel 2005; Nichols & Peterson 2013; Harbour 2016). Semantic distinctions also play a role in markedness relations. For example, third person is a non-participant and therefore different from first and second (e.g. Silverstein 1976). For number, semantic markedness has been argued to be the opposite of morphological markedness, with singular as the more marked category (Sauerland 2008). The aim of this workshop is to explore these and related issues.

The submission deadline for abstracts is September 15, 2017.

> Read the complete Call for Papers

Jeroen van Craenenbroeck, Cora Pots, and Guido Vanden Wyngaerd will be presenting talks at the annual Linguistics in the Netherlands (LIN)-day in Utrecht on Feb 4.