International Conference on Minority Languages XII, "Language contact and change in multiply and multimodally bilingual minority situations", May 28-30, 2009, Tartu, Estonia

In the framework of the 11th International Congress for Finno-Ugric Studies, to be held at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Piliscsaba (near Budapest) between 9-14th August, 2010, we organize a workshop devoted to the formal analysis of the syntax of Finno-Ugric languages, focusing on how their particular features relate to Universal Grammar.

Analyses of Finno-Ugric languages have made a number of important contributions to the theory of Universal Grammar, over the years, extending the limits of syntactic variation allowed by UG. They demonstrated the presence of a rich, articulated left periphery in sentence structure, involving, for example, a contrastive position in Finnish, and, in Hungarian, exhaustive structural focus as well as landing sites for overt quantifier raising. Other issues raised by Finno-Ugric languages included freedom of word order in certain sections of the sentence (but strict word order in the left periphery). They showed the need for divorcing the predicate-external argument from the grammatical function 'subject'. The complex Finno-Ugric possessive construction served as argument for assuming layers of functional projections in the noun phrase. The rich system of cases - among them the partitive case of Finnish and Estonian - remain a challenge to standard case theory. The problems raised by the partitive case include its interaction with the specificity of the internal argument, with aspect, epistemic modality, and with verb-object agreement. In Ostyak, the mapping of theta-roles on case positions appears to interact both with specificity and with discourse functions. Finno-Ugric negation also has its particular properties to be accounted for, including a negative auxiliary in Finnish and Sami, the abessive/caritive negation, and intricate negative concord phenomena in several languages. The partial pro-drop characteristic of Finnish has necessitated a modification of the theory of pro-drop, and the Estonian impersonal and genitive agents are instances of current debate. Among the phenomena in Finno-Ugric languages which deserve to be more widely known in the linguistic research community is the great variety of non-finite constructions, often with intricate agreement and case patterns. Another is the variety of question particles, focus particles, and modal particles. For example, Estonian has both a sentence-initial and sentence-final Q-particles, while Finnish has a 'second-position' Q-particle which can be deeply embedded in a fronted phrase. The mix of head-final and head-initial properties found particularly in the Western Finno-Ugric languages poses challenges to theories of linearization (including the LCA).

The workshop "The Syntax of Finno-Ugric Languages and Universal Grammar" will treat issues of these types, providing formal analyses of empirical phenomena against the background of standard universal assumptions. The workshop will consist of 30-minute presentations followed by 10-minute discussions, a round table for Finnish, and a poster presentation.

For additional information, please contact the organizers:

Katalin É. Kiss (Pázmány Péter University) ekiss at nytud.hu

Anders Holmberg (Newcastle University) anders.holmberg at newcastle.ac.uk

Anne Tamm (Research Institute of Linguistics, Budapest) anne.tamm at unifi.it