Corrélâts de l’ordre OV et structure de l’information - Atelier international OV-IS 2018

Les laboratoires de recherche Structure et dynamique des langues (Sedyl), Mondes iranien et indien (MII) et le Labex Fondements Empiriques de la Linguistique (EFL) organisent à l’Inalco un colloque international de linguistique.

Organisation
Claudine Chamoreau (CEMCA) ; Pollet Samvelian (Sorbonne-Nouvelle, MII, Labex EFL) ; Anaïd Donabédian (Inalco, SeDyL, Labex EFL)

Argumentaire/pitch
Studies on (S)OV basic word order (head final VP) have pointed out several correlations concerning other word order properties in SOV languages (Greenberg 1963, Dryer 1992 and sqq) but also apparently non-related morphological (agglutination) or various syntactic (Haider 2014) properties. It has been suggested that SOV basic orders display a clear inclination toward discourse configurationality (Kiss 1995), which could be related to a universal trend for a preverbal focus position. Major languages illustrating this situation were Hungarian, Japanese and Korean. Since the 2000s, extensive work by Stavros Skopeteas on Information structure has led to the extension of these questions to new areas, like Caucasus and Meso-America.

The Workshop brings together linguists interested in these issues in different areas, and having first-hand access to languages under study, as well as specialists of non OV languages as a control sample. It aims to be a first step toward a further in-depth comparative study of the phenomena under discussion, in various perspectives (especially testing and explaining more general typological correlations, accounting for word order and syntactic variation from a diachronic and areal point of view), and in all relevant languages (with some emphasis on Western Asia and Mesoamerica). We would also like to discuss the extent to which a given language can be labelled as SOV, when it also displays alternative orders are identified in a language (MC vs SC in German ; OV and preverbal focus vs VO and post-verbal focus in Georgian and in Eastern Armenian), and how Information structure correlations are involved in the debate.