Explorations in Syntactic Government and Subcategorisation

Wednesday 31 August 2011 - Saturday 3 September 2011
University of Cambridge, UK

This international conference is dedicated to the phenomenon of 'syntactic government', a type of dependency which links linguistic elements making up a clause.

It is generally acknowledged that under government a principal element requires that a dependent element appears in a particular form. For example, a verb which functions as a predicate may require that a noun which functions as this predicate's object should appear in genitive case. Despite a basic consensus, the interpretation of the notions 'principal element', 'dependent element', and what it means for one element to determine another element's form, can vary considerably between linguistic frameworks. Likewise, when government as a syntactic dependency is equated with subcategorisation, there is no consensus about where to draw the lines between subcategorisation, semantic selection, and co-occurrence.

The conference aims to bring together descriptive linguists, typologists, theoretical, computational and corpus linguists to debate the notions of syntactic government and subcategorisation from their different perspectives. The broader aim is to promote cross-theoretical and cross-disciplinary discussion between linguists working along different paths in pursuit of the common goal of understanding natural language and modelling it for computational applications.

Organisers:

Anna Kibort (University of Cambridge)    ak243 @ cam.ac.uk
Arturas Ratkus (University of Cambridge)    ar392 @ cam.ac.uk

with thanks to George Walkden (University of Cambridge) for help during the conference

The conference is supported by a Conference Support Grant from the British Academy.