B.6 Uralic nominal structures: noun phrases and nominal sentences

The symposium is dedicated to the study of constructions that have the noun as their core element, both from a descriptive and from a theoretical perspective. Our aim is to bring together researchers who will present their latest results regarding the syntactic structure and the semantic properties of noun phrases as well as nominal predication patterns in Uralic languages. The results of the discussion are expected to fill the descriptive gaps, on the one hand, and to enrich our knowledge of the Uralic language family through comparative syntactic observations, on the other hand. Studying Uralic nominal patterns provide additional empirical data for linguistic typology as well. We also hope to offer a new insight into the syntax of nominal structures in general and to advance theoretical research in this field, through providing formal analyses that account for language-specific phenomena and refining previously established hypotheses regarding the relevant structures.

The basic research questions concern the internal properties of noun phrases, with special attention to referentiality, definiteness, possession, agreement phenomena, head-finality, and adnominal modification including relative clauses. Word order variation within the noun phrase and the non-possessive use of possessive suffixes are especially in the center of our interest. At the same time, the symposium invites papers that deal with nominal sentences, i.e. clauses with a nominal constituent as their predicate. The main aspects of nominal predication to be discussed are the following: the absence/presence of copular elements, the morphological agreement between the subject and the predicate, the case marking of NP predicates, as well as the referential properties of the constituents and its consequences on syntax, especially on word order. Additionally, we are also interested in patterns of predicative possession, as these are closely connected to possessive structures within the noun phrase, and in locative and existential constructions, which are in turn connected to nominal clauses.

The symposium also aims at exploring how efficiently syntactic hypotheses can be tested using corpora that have been developed for Uralic languages. Accordingly, data-mining and empirical observations based on electronic databases and annotated corpora are extremely welcome. Selected papers will be published after the conference as a special issue of the scholarly journal Finno-Ugric Languages and Linguistics (FULL).

Contact: Barbara Egedi (RIL HAS), egedib@yahoo.com