Conference Review 

Interdisciplinary Approaches to Relative Clauses

13-15 September 2007

The conference took place between 13th  and 15th  September 2007.  The conference focused on a  single linguistic structure, relative clauses, and brought together researchers approaching  the properties of relative clauses from different perspectives. Relative clauses are complex constructions grammatically, yet very frequent and highly productive crosslinguistically. Understanding their properties is, thus, fundamental for theories of grammar, linguistic typology, language acquisition and processing. Many of their structural and interpretive properties have now been investigated and there is a growing body of work on their acquisition and processing. However, there have been insufficient efforts to integrate insights and results across different subdisciplines. Building on the success of the preparatory “Workshop on the Typology, Acquisition and Processing of Relative Clauses” (Leipzig 2005, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology), the conference brought together researchers investigating relative clauses from different subdisciplines: linguistic typology, grammatical theory, processing, first and second language acquisition, computational/corpus linguistics and historical linguistics.   

The call of papers attracted a high number of high quality submissions. After rigorous reviewing by an international scientific committee a broad and interesting program was compiled with contributions from internationally acclaimed scholars. The conference opened with a focus on the theoretical  and typological challenges involved in the study of relative clauses with the contributions of the first day tackling empirical challenges raised by an unusually wide range of languages and also addressing questions of diachronic change. The second day extended and challenged theoretical generalisations with  contributions on the reality of  processing and acquisition of relative clauses, bringing to light fascinating quantitative corpus data and results from sophisticated psycholinguistic experiments investigating adult and child grammars from a wide range of languages (East Asian languages, Turkish, Hebrew, Italian Sign Language to name a few). The final day shifted focus on exciting recent work from the area of computational and corpus linguistics. The conference was generously sponsored by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology as well as Cambridge Assessment (ESOL) and the Scandinavian Studies Fund. The Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities of the University of Cambridge provided invaluable administrative support.

We expect to publish a volume based on contributions for this conference. OUP has expressed provisional interest.

Dora Alexopoulou (Lille/Cambridge)

 

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