About

Animacy features and the flexibility of pronouns is a subproject of the SFB Language between redundancy and the deficiency (Austrian Science Fund SFB 10.55776/F1003; funding period: March 2024 - Feb 2028)

We investigate the animancy features (and animacy restrictions) of different types of pronouns mostly in the context of prepositional phrases. The main questions addressed in this subproject are (i) whether certain types of pronouns are specified in terms of animacy (e.g., strong pronouns as +human) and (ii) how redundancy and deficiency allow such pronouns to be used in a way that deviates from their animacy features (e.g., strong pronouns for inanimate referents).

Activities

• Publications

Heidinger, Steffen, 2024. Types of zero complements in French and Spanish prepositional phrases: New evidence from acceptability judgment experiments. In: Isogloss. 10,1. 1-29. doi:10.5565/rev/isogloss.371

• Presentations

Heidinger, Steffen; da Cunha, Yanis. Argument drop and competition effects: An experimental study on French and Spanish PPs. 58th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea. Bordeaux. 26.–29.8.2025.

Da Cunha, Yanis; Heidinger, Steffen. 2025. Animacy restrictions on French strong pronouns: A spanning approach in Distributed Morphology. Salzburg Redefi Days. Salzburg. 4.7.2025.

Schwarzenberger, Alina; Da Cunha, Yanis; Heidinger, Steffen. 2025. French Strong Pronouns, Animacy and Competition: Corpus Data on Three Competition Triggers. Poster at Salzburg Redefi Days. Salzburg. 4.7.2025.

Da Cunha, Yanis; Heidinger, Steffen. Competition-driven animacy mismatches in anaphoric relations. Poster at Mismatches in anaphoric relations (RED 25). Graz. 29.-30.05.2025.

Heidinger, Steffen. 2025. Aceptabilidad y frecuencia: El caso de las preposiciones huérfanas. Deutscher Hispanistiktag. Hamburg. 12.03.2025.

Da Cunha, Yanis; Heidinger, Steffen. 2025. Competition effects on animacy restrictions in French and Spanish PPs. LingLunch. Université Paris Cité. Paris. 20.02.2025.

Da Cunha, Yanis; Heidinger, Steffen. 2025. Redundanz, Defizienz und Wettbewerb: Belebtheit und Pronomen im Französischen und Spanischen. Oberseminar Romanistik. Universität Regensburg. 13.01.2025.

Da Cunha, Yanis; Heidinger, Steffen; Schwarzenberger, Alina. 2024. Competition and animacy restrictions: French and Spanish PPs as a case. Workshop: Pronouns in PPs. Graz / Online. 05.12.2024.

Heidinger, Steffen. 2024. Types of zero complements in French and Spanish prepositional phrases: New evidence from acceptability judgment experiments. SLE 2024, Helsinki. 24.08.2024.

• Events

Online-workshop Pronouns in PPs: Orphan Prepositions and Pronoun Types