Colloque Going Romance

Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main (Germany)

The Institute of Romance Languages and Literature at the Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main will host Going Romance 2016, on December 8-10, 2016. On December 10, there will be two Workshops : workshop 1 is titled ‘Language Change meets Acquisition’, and workshop 2 is titled ‘Prosody meets Syntax’.

Invited speakers for the Main Session :




• Pierre Larrivée

  (Université de Caen Normandie)




• Ana Maria Martins

  (Universidade de Lisboa)




• Antonella Sorace

  (University of Edinburgh)




Invited speaker for Workshop 1 ‘Language Change meets Acquisition’ :




• Tanja Kupisch

  (Universität Konstanz)




Invited speaker for Workshop 2 ‘Prosody meets Syntax’ :




• Gorka Elordieta

  (University of the Basque country)




Main session

Contributions combining theory and data in a plurality of domains of grammar are welcome. We especially invite papers set in a formal framework with a solid empirical basis in all areas of Romance linguistics : phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. This year the conference also aims at being a moment of discussion and reflection on methodological issues. In particular, we will focus on how to combine detailed theoretical questions and clear predictions with different sets of empirical or experimental data.

There will be both oral presentations (25 + 10 minutes) and poster presentations.

Workshop 1 on December 10, ‘Language Change meets Acquisition’

In the last twenty years, the empirical and theoretical research on language change on the one hand and on first and second language acquisition on the other has grown exponentially. Nowadays, both can be considered in their own right as two of the most well-established and fruitful empirical domains of investigation. In both domains experimental methods and statistical evaluation procedures have been standardized and the results obtained have deeply increased what we know about language.

Since language change is related to language acquisition, the object of investigation of both fields is virtually the same. However, there has been relatively little contact between researchers working in the two domains. The aim of this workshop is to compare methods and in particular the foundational assumptions of the theory in order to reach a better understanding of the procedure according to which language develops, both in the individual and across generations.

Workshop 2 on December 10, ‘Prosody meets Syntax’

The goal of this workshop is to discuss the latest theoretical and empirical advances in the domain of the syntax-prosody interface from a Romance perspective. More specifically, we will focus on the relationship between syntactic and prosodic constituent structure, as well as the factors influencing this relationship (such as information structure, syntactic branching, prosodic weight, multilingualism, language contact, acquisition, attrition etc.). Work on Romance languages has made an important contribution to this field during the last decades (e.g. Nespor & Vogel 1986, Ghini 1993, Vallduví 1993, Zubizarreta 1998, Frascarelli 2000, Samek-Lodovici 2006).

In this workshop, we would like to discuss recent contributions of this language family w.r.t. topics such as




• theoretical modelling (e.g. within Match Theory, Selkirk 2011 ; within phase theory/minimalism, Kratzer & Selkirk 2007 ; within a cartographic approach, Bocci 2013)




• the (non-necessary) correspondence between focus and sentential stress (e.g. Féry 2013, Feldhausen & Vanrell Bosch 2015)




• the role of elements such as vocatives (e.g. D’Alessandro & van Oostendorp, to appear), dislocations (e.g. López 2009, Feldhausen 2016, Samek-Lodovici 2015), parentheticals (e.g. Avanzi 2012 ; or Dehé 2014 for English), or related expressions




• the relationship between sentence type and tonal configuration (e.g. Frota & Prieto 2015, Santiago & Delais-Roussarie 2015 ; Truckenbrodt 2012 for English)




• (L1 and/or L2) acquisition and/or attrition of the interface (e.g. Zubizarreta 2009, Zubizarreta & Nava 2011)




• language contact (e.g. Muntendam 2013, Muntendam & Torreira 2016).




Call for papers

Abstracts should be anonymous and no longer than two A4 pages, including references and examples, with margins of at least 1 inch, font size 12, single-spaced. The file should be anonymous both in the body of the text and in the filename. Please make sure all fonts and figures are correctly rendered.

Submissions are limited to a maximum of one individual and one joint abstract per author. Please indicate in your submission whether your abstract should be considered for the main session, or for one of the workshops (as an oral presentation or a poster).

Papers not conforming to these requirements will not be taken into consideration.

The abstracts should be submitted through EasyChair (

) no later than Monday 11 July 2016 as a PDF-file. A deadline extension will not be possible.

All authors who present their work in the Main Session will be invited to submit their paper for a volume of selected contributions to be published by John Benjamins. A publication for the workshop contributions is also foreseen.

Local organizing committee

Main organizers

Cecilia Poletto, Esther Rinke

Further organizers

Elisabeth Aßmann, Irene Caloi, Martin Elsig, Ingo Feldhausen, Irene Franco, Eugenia Greco, Imme Kuchenbrandt, Nicolas Lamoure, Anna Marchesini, Mareike Neuhaus, Diego Pescarini, Emanuela Sanfelici, Silvia Schäfer, Matthieu Segui, Judith Wieprecht

Workshop 1 organizers

Cecilia Poletto, Esther Rinke

Workshop 2 organizers

Nicole Dehé

(Universität Konstanz),

Ingo Feldhausen

(Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt),

Maria del Mar Vanrell

(Freie Universität Berlin)

Steering committee

Meeting Location

Campus Westend, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Contact Information

Ingo Feldhausen & Irene Franco

Email : goingromance2016@gmail.com

Meeting Dates

The Going Romance 2016 will be held from 8 December 2016 to 10 December 2016.

Abstract Submission Information

Abstracts can be submitted from 15 May 2016 to 11 July 2016.

EasyChair link :

Deadline for abstract submission

 :

11 July 2016 ; 23:59 UTC/GMT +1

(There will be no deadline extension).