Provisional list of teaching personnel and course topics (to be extended)

David Porcel Bueno (Granada): Organization, inaugural session

Adrian Chircu (Cluj-Napoca): The history of adverbs and adverbials from Latin to Romance

Martin Hummel (Graz): Sprachausbau (elaboration), selection, and standardization in the adverbial domain during the Rennaissance and beyond

Stefan Koch (Graz): Fieldwork on adverbs in primary dialects of Italo-Romance and Ibero-Romance

Inka Wissner (Besançon): The sociolinguistics of adverbs in French and Romance

Katharina Gerhalter (Graz): Corpus research on adverbs in Romance languages (Sketch Engine)

Sandra Jiménez Pareja (Alicante): Corpus linguistics: a contrastive analysis of subject-oriented adverbs in English and Spanish

Juan Manuel Ribes Lorenzo (Zaragoza): The quadrant aragonés-churro-valenciano-catalán from its adverbial locutions. 

Miguel Gutiérrez-Maté (Freiburg): The evolution of prepositional phrases in Romance creoles and other contact varieties

Cecilia Poletto (Padova & Frankfurt): Negative Concord through adverbs

The courses will be held in English or in a Romance language with English slides. 

General description

The Blended Intensive Programme (= BIP) is set out to provide the students with a comprehensive view of how adverbs and adverbial modification work in the Romance languages and in contiguous languages. Apart from the standard languages, a particular focus will also lie on spoken varieties, non-canonical adverbs, Romance dialects, the Latin-Romance interface, and Romance-derived languages like creoles.

Adverbs, adverbialization, and adverbial modification have to a certain degree evaded linguistic classification to this day, and adverbs themselves have been donned with all kinds of epithets like “dustbin category”, “perverts”, or “inducing madness” to those who try to study them.

This goes as far as that even the whole world class “adverb” has been cast into doubt by some researchers and more functional classificatory approaches have been proposed. In fact, it is suggested that adverbs be regarded simply as part of a group or word class of, in principle, unspecified attributive elements, whose syntactic scope decides if they are adverbial or adjectival in nature. Yet, there seems to be a clearly discernible tendency. The overt morphosyntactic marking of a linguistic unit as adverb leads to syntactic mobility or flexibility – the clearer marked for adverbiality a linguistic unit is, the more positions in a sentence it can take.

This intriguing world of adverbial modification is explored during the Blended Intensive Programme, reaching from the standard languages to the actual spoken dialects. The latter show even to a greater degree the immense potential of the Romance languages in terms of a vast variety of possibilities and strategies to express adverbial content in different conditions and contingent on the intended scope and adverbial function. 

As classification is one of the topics, the Blended Intensive Programme is also determined to extend its scope to contiguous world classes that may be argued to be adverbial in nature to some degree or historically have been adverbs. This concerns, in the first place, prepositions and discourse markers, which will have their own space in the program.

In terms of the studied languages, the Blendend Intensive Programme, additionally to primary Romance dialects and New World varieties, also includes Romance based creole languages

A strong focus of the Blendend Intensive Programme also lies on the theoretical, empirical and methodological foundations for the linguistic research of adverbs. Apart of the gained insights described before, the students are provided with the scientific tools to not only study adverbs, but to conduct data and theory based linguistic research in general, with a strong methodological background.

Although the technical language of the Blended Intensive Programme will be mostly English, inter-Romance intercomprehension is actively endorsed at the event, motivating the students to use their own Romance languages and at the same time acknowledge the shared heritage of all Romance languages by discovering that with little effort communication between the languages stemming from Latin is possible in an extended and natural way. Ultimately, this shall also cause dissemination effects for a greater feeling of European belonging.