The First Vigo-Newcastle-Santiago-Leuven Workshop on ‘The Structure of the Noun Phrase in English: Synchronic and Diachronic Explorations’ (NP1) was held at the University of Vigo (Spain) on 2-3 October 2009. The objective of the workshop was to bring together researchers who are currently looking at the English NP from different points of view (theoretical, structural, functional, textual and descriptive). The ultimate aim was to approach aspects in the structure and distribution of English NPs which remain unsolved despite the enormous literature available on the nature of nouns and NPs.
The workshop was organized by the LVTC research team, in cooperation with the VLCG group (Variation, Linguistic Change and Grammaticalisation) at the University of Santiago de Compostela, the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics in Newcastle, and the Functional Linguistics Leuven (FLL) research group.
This workshop was honoured to receive four internationally recognized plenary speakers: Douglas Biber, from Northern Arizona University, William Croft, from the University of New Mexico, Evelien Keizer, from the University of Amsterdam, and John Payne, from the University of Manchester.
The conference delegates came from many different universities, located both in Europe and elsewhere. There were speakers from the universities of Vienna, Osnabrück, Postdam, Lille 3, Perpignan, Paris 7, Helsinki, Geneva, London, Newcastle, Cambridge, Vigo, Leuven and the Kyung Hee University. The various papers presented covered a wide range of topics: morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, Typology, Historical Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, and some others.
The NP1 workshop was meant to be the first one in a series of scientific meetings fully devoted to the in-depth study of the English NP. In the coming years the Universities of Newcastle, Leuven and Santiago will host the following editions of the workshop.
