Calendar

• An Van linden (University of Liège)

dans le cadre DTT : Atelier Morphosyntaxe

This series of seminars looks into alienability contrasts and – taking grammatical typology as a starting point – fosters interaction with lexical typology and psycholinguistics. While adnominal possession (‘my arm’ vs. ‘my garden’) is a well-researched area of grammar where alienability contrasts show up, the series aims to cast the net wider, and also invites contributions that deal with other alienability phenomena, at any morphosyntactic level of description. For instance, whereas some clause-level phenomena have been attested in Eurasia (e.g. the body part locative construction in English as in Sam kissed Joe on the cheek), the Americas are well-known for the ubiquity of a particular word-level phenomenon, i.e. that of bound nouns, or obligatorily possessed nouns, as opposed to independent or optionally possessed nouns. Also welcome are talks presenting (cross-linguistic comparisons of) inventories of lexical items that are treated as inalienable in grammar. Ultimately, the idea is to better understand to what extent the alienability contrast is universal. Where do individual languages have their “cut-off point” in the lexicon, i.e. to what extent is it culturally determined which items are grammatically treated as inalienably possessed?