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Workshop I

Valency in clauses and verb-related structures

Convenors: Anna Malicka-Kleparska and Maria Bloch-Trojnar, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin

The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers representing different theoretical paradigms and discuss most recent theoretical developments in the study of valency-related phenomena in various languages.

The workshop will address semantic, syntactic and morphological implications of valency-enriching and valency-reducing operations as manifested in clauses and verb-related nominal and adjectival structures.

Valency (or diathesis), specifies the arguments (obligatory participants) in a structure. The number and type of such participants are directly prompted by a cognitively relevant situation, but the ways of spelling out the participants may depend on the grammar of a given language. Consequently, the logical participants and the grammatical participants may differ  and valency can be treated as a phenomenon which is directly related to event structure, and which is semantic in nature, or couched in syntactic structures and purely grammatical in its essence. Thus, valency features prominently in the projectionist-constructionist debate.

The papers in the workshop will address the most extensively investigated valency changes, such as causativization vs. anticausativization, middle formation, anti-passivization and reflexivization as well as papers relating to the less common phenomena which are understudied. The workshop is open to proposals that address questions of argument overtness, argument alternations, argument structure preservation in clauses and de-verbal nominal and adjectival structures, the presence of logical arguments, interactions between arguments and adverbial modification of various types, the relationship between aspect and valency, (fake) reflexives, realization and choice of case, the role of definiteness and quanization, etc.