Call for Papers: ‘Support-verb constructions in the corpora of Greek: between lexicon and grammar?’
Faculty of Classics, University of Oxford, 5–6 Sep 2023
Support-verb constructions have received increasing interest in academic and industry contexts in recent years, yet our dictionaries and digital tools are lagging. From the general linguistic perspective, they are of interest in the context of complex predicates, from the computational perspective, in the context of machine translation. For Greek, interest has focussed on the verb ποιέομαι and/or literary classical texts. The workshop ‘Support-verb constructions in the corpora of Greek: between lexicon and grammar?’ will (i) highlight avenues for future research on support-verb constructions, (ii) bring together specialists of diverse fields, and (iii) produce a handbook of methodologies and robust data collections on support-verb constructions in the corpora of Greek.
Support-verb constructions are considered combinations of a verb and a noun that act as the predicate, as ‘made the suggestion’ in I made the suggestion that she join. They are frequent, variable and ambiguous across texts, thus creating difficulties for translation and analysis applications. E.g. he took a picture does not involve a physical frame or he took heart barbaric behaviour. Understood correctly, support-verb constructions inform about the speakers’ background (e.g. concerning dialect, to take a shower replaces British to have a shower in the US) or communicative settings (e.g. to make a contribution replaces spoken to make a comment in writing).
However, opinions are divided. The term ‘light-verb construction’ is widely used in language-contact studies and primarily with reference to the verb ‘to do’ (Bakker 2003 p. 132; Myers-Scotton 2002 pp. 134–139; Reintges 2001; Ronan 2012 p. 148; Rutherford 2010 p. 203); ‘function-verb construction’ is applied primarily to verb-prepositional phrase combinations but secondarily also to verb-object combinations (Kamber 2008; von Polenz 1987; Storrer 2009); ‘support-verb construction’ comes from a research tradition that considers verb-object structures of primary interest (Giry-Schneider 1987; Gross 1984). The key characteristics that tie all these together are: (i) The noun is the semantic head and the verb the syntactic head (Nagy et al. 2013 p. 329). (ii) ‘The predicate structure (or event structure) is determined by more than one element’ (Bowern 2008 p. 165).
SVCs are pervasive throughout the history of Greek yet understudied to date, primarily due to issues surrounding data collection. The Leverhulme-funded project ‘Giving Gifts and Doing Favours: Unlocking Greek Support-Verb Constructions’ (2020–2023) has focused on literary classical Attic prose, oratory and historiography with a carefully-curated project corpus and fine-tuned digital tools. The workshop aims to explore SVCs (i) in periods other than the classical, e.g. archaic or post-classical, (ii) in non-literary sources, incl. papyri and inscriptions, (iii) in educational resources, esp. dictionaries, and (iv) in digital tools, incl. natural language processing. Aspects of interest include but are not limited to:
-
- Diachronic development of support-verb constructions from Archaic into modern Greek
- Synchronic profile of support-verb constructions (e.g. language-contact approaches, socio-linguistic approaches, narratological approaches)
- Support-verb constructions as verbal multi-word expressions and their relationship with other verbal multi-word expressions (e.g. phrasal verbs, idioms)
- Support-verb constructions as complex predicates and their relationship with other complex predicates and periphrasis
- Methods for the identification and discovery of support-verb constructions in large corpora (incl. manual, semi-automated and automated approaches; comparison with and adaptation of frameworks and methodologies developed for languages other than Greek are most welcome)
- Support-verb constructions as lexemes and their relationship with other members of the lexicon (e.g. including their semantic composition, the eventiveness of the noun, issues of word formation)
- Syntactic surroundings of support-verb constructions (incl. the syntax-semantics interface)
- Pragmatic surroundings of support-verb constructions and their discourse functions
- Typological approaches to support-verb constructions across languages (yet with clear reference to the Greek data), especially with regard to how to delimit the group of relevant structures.
There are no constraints on corpora with regard to text type, material, or period of time. Preference will however be given to data-driven over theory-heavy proposals.
The invited speakers are Prof Helma Dik (University of Chicago) and Prof Agata Savary (University Paris-Saclay).
The workshop will take place in-person for speakers, yet will be streamed via Zoom, such that those who would like to participate without contributing a paper can be accommodated and are most welcome to join into the discussion. Papers should be 20min in length and will be followed by 10min of discussion.
The proceedings of the workshop will be published with Language Science Press.
Please send abstracts of maximal 500 words in PDF format to victoria.fendel@classics.ox.ac.uk. Abstracts should be written in English. Abstracts should clearly describe the data sample, explain the argumentation, and indicate results. Abstracts should include references and/or a project bibliography. Please include your affiliation.
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 01 Feb 2023 12 noon U.K. time
Notification of outcome: by 15 Mar 2023
The workshop is kindly funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the John Fell Fund.
Website: www.svcoxford2023.com
Introductory literature: (please see website)