The semantic-pragmatic category specificity is a very recent category – it was introduced in the late sixties. Since then it has been used in many descriptive grammars for describing a great variety of grammatical phenomena, such as different articles, case markings (e.g., differentiated object marking), the modality in relative clauses, word order and information structure, clitic doubling, to list only a few. Thus specificity seems to be a category that is realized in very different grammatical areas. 

The workshop intends to investigate the semantic and syntactic aspects of this category in the Romance language family. Romance languages provide an interesting field for investigating specificity since they show some common realizations of specificity (such as the interaction of modality in the relative clause with the specificity of the head noun), but they also show language particular grammatical reflexes of specificity, such as Spanish a or Romanian pe.

The workshop brings together experts in Romance languages that will discuss different semantic and syntactic aspects of specificity. We hope that the presentations and discussions will provide us with a more detailed picture of the linguistic realization of specificity in Romance languages, but also about a more detailed linguistic model of specificity in general.

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Schedule:

October, 17th	Introduction (Klaus von Heusinger / Georg A. Kaiser)
14:30 - 15:00	Student talk(s)
16:00 - 16:30	Coffee break
16:30 - 17:30	Elisabeth Stark (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München / FU Berlin): "Determination and typology or why Er verwendet Butter, und nicht …l and Usa burro, e non olio, but not *Il utilise beurre, et non pas huile?"
17:30 - 18:30	Roberto Zamparelli (Università di Bergamo):"Singular determiners in Italian"
October, 18th
09:00 - 10:00	Ileana Comorovski (Université Nancy 2): "On Some Indefinite Determiners of French"
10:00 - 10:30	Coffee break
10:30 - 11:30	Student talk(s)
11:30 - 12:30	Student talk(s)
12:30 - 13:00	Final discussion (Manuel Leonetti)
Afternoon:	Opportunity for indiviual consultation for the students by the guest professors and by Manuel Leonetti, Klaus von Heusinger and Georg Kaiser

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