Blog CRC1646

The Conference of the Student Organization of Linguists in Europe (ConSOLE) is an annual conference in theoretical linguistics. ConSOLE provides an international platform for early-career scholars to present and discuss their research in an open and stimulating academic environment. The 33rd edition took place last year at the University of Göttingen. The ConSOLE34 was held on January 28-30 at the Instituto Universitario di Studi Superiori (IUSS) Pavia.

The general focus was „Movement“, with a focus on how linguistic movement manifests itself in syntax, semantics, phonology, and morphology. ConSOLE34 was featured by invited talks by Professor Gillian Ramchand (University of Oxford), Professor Andrea Moro (IUSS Pavia), Professor Vieri Samek-Lodovici (University College London), and Professor Anna Maria Di Sciullo (Université du Québec à Montréal) which addressed theoretical as well as empirical and methodological aspects.

In his talk, entitled „Factive Islands in German. Do modal particles improve the acceptability of extraction?“ Fabian Zöfelt, PhD in Project A01 reported on a study in which he examines whether or not modal particles improve the acceptability of extraction from embedded clauses headed by factive verbs such as bedauern („to regret“). The results do not support the assumption that acceptability increases. Moreover, his results also challenge previous assumptions on the islandhood of those clauses which are considered to be opaque for extraction. Fabian also outlined a derivational analysis within the generative framework that accounts for inter-speaker variation regarding such dependencies in German.

As Fabian is working on and empirically investigating long-distance dependencies, namely on cross-clausal movement and its restrictions in German, this conference was an excellent occasion to get feedback on his work and to see on what topics other researchers are currently working, especially since there were many talks analysed movement and island effects from a syntactic perspective.

Fabian Zöfelt © ConSOLE

Projekt Team A01: from left to right: Jutta Hartmann, András Bárány, Fabian Zöfelt & Szilvia Daszó

Photo: Sascha Hermannski © SFB 1646