Call for papers - workshop on Future at The 43rd annual Meeting of Societas Linguistica Europaea Vilnius University, Lithuania, 2-5 September 2010

[Philippe De Brabanter]

Workshop ‘Future
tense(s) / future time(s)' 
 
The 43rd annual Meeting of Societas Linguistica Europaea 
Vilnius University, Lithuania, 2-5 September 2010 
 
Convenors: 
Philippe De Brabanter (Université Paris 4-Sorbonne – Institut Jean Nicod)
Mikhail Kissine (FNRS, Université Libre de Bruxelles) 
Saghie Sharifzadeh (Université Paris 4-Sorbonne) 
 
Contact: phdebrab at yahoo.co.uk 
 
Call for Papers 
 
Time Frame: 
We ask potential participants to send us their provisional titles and short
descriptions no later than 12 November so as to allow us to submit our workshop
proposal to the SLE Scientific Committee before 15 November 2009. 
 
In case of acceptance of our proposal, all abstracts will have to be
submitted by the end of December via the ‘submit abstract’ form to be found on
the SLE website.
 
Description:
Among
tenses and linguistic expressions that anchor events and situations in time,
those that refer to the future occupy a special place. The most obvious reason
is the 'open' or 'indeterminate' character of the future: at least from our
present point of view, the future course of events is not fixed while there is
arguably only one past. This problem has exercised the minds of all those who
have attempted to provide a semantic account of future temporal reference. Not
surprisingly, this has led numerous linguists to argue that (at least certain)
linguistic markers of futurity belong to the category of modality rather than
to the tense system proper. And it is true, typically in Germanic languages,
that the central markers of futurity have often developed diachronically from
modal verbs.
 
However,
the semantic indeterminacy of future reference is just one among many fascinating
questions. These include (the list is not exhaustive): 
- pastness
in the future
- futurity
in the past
- ‘distance’
in the future (near vs. remote future) 
- the use
of future tense or other verbal forms marking future time in subordinate
clauses
- the use
of verbal forms usually marking future time to mean other things than reference
to future time.
 
In this
workshop, we would like to promote a fresh look at the future by bringing
together semanticists, typologists, cognitive linguists and other linguists
interested in all things future. We encourage scholars from various theoretical
traditions to submit papers. We also wish to reach across traditional languages
lines and welcome submissions that examine similarities and differences between
Romance or Germanic languages on the one hand, and other language groups on the
other.
 
Important dates:
 
Deadline for submissions: November
12, 2009
Conference: September 2-5,
2010