Workshop Description

Since Rizzi’s (1997) original syntactic exploration of the sentential left periphery, the complexity of the domain at a clause’s edge has received attention from linguists studying syntax, semantics and prosody. However, study of the cross-linguistic variety in clause boundaries, clause typing, and the information-structural use of peripheral positions has only scratched the surface.

This workshop seeks to bring together linguists working on the “left edge” of the sentence from a variety of theoretical backgrounds. We hope to facilitate dialogue between discourse theorists, semanticists, syntacticians, phonologists, and phoneticians to come to a better understanding of what is going on just above (syntactically) or just before (phonologically) the traditional IP domain.

Topics that the workshop will cover include but are not limited to: clause typing, complementation, discourse constraints on argument structure, information structure, and word order change as they pertain to the left periphery, sentence-initial positions, and the CP domain.

Thank you to our presenters and attendees!

Thanks again to all who attended the workshop. We were extremely pleased with the quality of presentations and discussion throughout the weekend.

For those interested in handouts and/or slides used during the panels, they are being posted on the schedule page as we receive them.

Schedule of Panels

The workshop hosted four panels — two on Saturday and two on Sunday.

Each panel was 90 minutes, with ~30 minutes of presentations by the panelists, ~30 minutes of moderated discussion, and ~30 minutes for an open question-and-answer period.

Organizers

Ed Cormany

Cornell University, esc53@cornell.edu

Sarah Courtney

Cornell University, sgc47@cornell.edu

Cara DiGirolamo

Cornell University, cmd279@cornell.edu