Workshop: Formal approaches to Sardinian grammar

Thursday, 28th September, 2017
9:00-11:30 (2 lectures of about 75 minutes)

1. Lecture: Formal approaches to Sardinian morphosyntax

by Michael Allan Jones (University of Essex, Colchester)

This workshop provides an overview of some of the main syntactic phenomena of Sardinian within a broadly generative framework. Particular attention is given to phenomena which distinguish Sardinian from other Romance languages or which raise interesting theoretical questions. The range of topics includes:

- Fronting, focus and illocutionary force
- Interrogative a and emphatic ja
- Auxiliary choice (HAVE vs BE)
- Existential constructions
- Infinitives with non-control subjects
- Prepositional accusatives

=> Slides & References

2. Lecture: Formal approaches to Sardinian intonational phonology

by Maria del Mar Vanrell (Universitat de les Illes Balears, Mallorca)

Previous research on Sardinian intonation has mainly focused on describing the intonation patterns found in yes-no questions, even though recent studies have analyzed other sentence types such as neutral declaratives, also compared to yes-no questions. During the last years, the first studies within the Autosegmental-Metrical framework have been conducted focusing on different issues such as pitch accent alignment or the relationship between prosody and meaning. To our knowledge, no study existed describing the intonation patterns of different sentence types and pragmatic meanings in different Sardinian varieties following the same controlled methodology. In the talk therefore I will describe the intonation and phrasing patterns found in a variety of sentence types (statements, questions, commands and requests, vocatives). In addition I will present the results of two experiments in which two interface phenomena are addressed: truncation in vocatives and hypocoristics, and the expression of speaker bias in yes-no questions. I will conclude by discussing the relevance of intonation in the study of linguistic phenomena at the interface between syntax and pragmatics.

=> Slides