[Lingtyp] CfP Future tenses, DGfS Hamburg, 4 - 6 March 2020

[eugen.hill at uni-koeln.de]

Dear colleagues,

below is a Call for Papers for the Workshop 'APPROACHING LINGUISTIC  
DIVERSITY FROM AN EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE
TOWARDS A TYPOLOGY OF FUTURE TENSES' designed for the  Annual Meeting of
the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft, 4 – 6 March 2020, in
Hamburg, Germany.

If you are interested in participating with a talk, please send us
possibly soon but not later than September 7th a provisional title and
an abstract (up to 300 words) at the following address:
eugen.hill at uni-koeln.de.

Sincerely

The conveners



CALL FOR PAPERS

APPROACHING LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY FROM AN EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE
TOWARDS A TYPOLOGY OF FUTURE TENSES

Venue: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft, Annual Meeting
Hamburg 4–6 March 2020

Convenors: Elżbieta Adamczyk1, Martin Becker2, Eugen Hill2, and Björn Wiemer3
(1 Bergische Universität Wuppertal, 2 Universität zu Köln, 3 Johannes  
Gutenberg Universität Mainz)

Key-note speakers:	Joanna Blaszczak
			Uta Reinöhl

Call dead-line: 7 September 2019
Notification of acceptance: 15 September 2015


Unlike present and past tenses, future tenses exhibit a typologically  
robust tendency towards encoding modality. Accordingly, in the  
typological literature the future has been described both in temporal  
and modal terms (e.g. Comrie 1985, Dahl 1985, 2000b, Palmer 2001,  
among others). This might be ultimately rooted in the fact that the  
notion of future time is inherently linked to uncertainty given the  
fact that the current reality may develop in several ways. In a  
similar vein, future time reference is known to frequently interact  
with aspect and with aspectual properties of verbs and constructions  
(cf. Dickey 2000 for different Slavic languages). Accordingly, for  
instance Copley (2009) describes the encoding of future in terms of a  
hierarchical interplay between two operators, a modal and an aspectual  
one.
However, these features inherent to future time reference from a most  
general point of view do not by themselves explain the considerable  
variation we observe regarding modality and aspectuality in future  
grams (henceforth “futures”) of different languages. We assume that  
this variation can be better understood from a data-oriented  
semasiological perspective, which implies taking into account the  
diachronic dimension of futures. This amounts to finding answers to  
the following questions:

(a)	Which diachronic factors may be responsible for the observed  
variation in modal and aspectual values of futures? How to disentangle  
or isolate such factors in a particular case?
(b)	Which correlations are possible between these factors and the  
different kinds of modal and aspectual meanings in futures?
(c)	Which patterns of interaction between the different factors are  
actually attested in natural languages? How to search for and/or  
establish typologically recurrent patterns of interaction?
(d)	What are the possible trajectories of modality and aspectuality in  
the development of futures? How to search for and/or establish  
typologically recurrent trajectories?

At present, three different factors potentially relevant to modality  
and aspectuality in futures may count as securely established. The  
first factor is the different sources of future grams. Numerous  
languages possess futures known to have only recently evolved out of  
forms or constructions with non-future semantics (cf. Ultan 1978,  
Bybee & Pagliuca 1987, Bybee & Dahl 1989, Bybee, Pagliuca & Perkins  
1991, Dahl 2000a, Heine & Kuteva 2002, Wiemer & Hansen 2012). The most  
prominent sources, recurrently documented as generating futures in  
languages of different genetic and areal affiliations, are (a)  
tense-aspect forms (cf. the perfective future in North Slavic), (b)  
deontic (incl. volitional) modal expressions (cf. the shall- and  
will-futures in English, Balkan languages), (c) constructions with  
verbs of movement (cf. the komma-future in Swedish and the  
aller-future in French), (d) constructions with inchoative copula  
verbs (cf. the werden-future in German or the imperfective future in  
North Slavic). Less robustly attested are futures succeeding  
constructions with verbs such as say (in central eastern Bantu, cf.  
Botne 1998) or take (in Ukrainian, cf. Wiemer 2011: 745), futures  
evolved out of temporal adverbs (in Lingala, cf. Bybee, Pagliuca &  
Perkins 1991: 18–19) or, finally, futures reflecting an agent noun  
with copula verb (in Sanskrit, cf. Tichy 1992, Lowe 2017).
Differences in the semantics of the source constructions may be  
relevant in two similar but distinct ways, both of which are commonly  
subsumed under the notion of “source determination” (cf. Bybee,  
Perkins & Pagliuca 1994: 9, Hilpert 2008: 22–27, Reinöhl & Himmelmann  
2017: 391–399). First, in futures evolved out of a modal source  
remnants of modal use may always be expected. Accordingly, futures  
with similar modal sources are likely to exhibit similar inherited  
modal readings (such as volition in want-futures) while futures  
resulting from a different source construction are less so. Second,  
futures with a similar source may be expected to develop similarly.  
For instance, futures evolved out of modals encoding obligation  
display a tendency towards developing epistemic semantic extensions  
whereas encoding epistemic modality is not typically associated with  
come- or go-futures (cf. Hilpert 2008: 184).
The second factor may be the different mechanisms of future tense  
development. Here we may distinguish two mechanisms. The first  
mechanism is the grammaticalisation of an inherited content word,  
which might be a verb (turned into an auxiliary or semantically weak  
component of a serial verb construction) or an adverb with temporal  
semantics (cf. Bybee, Pagliuca & Perkins 1991, Bybee, Perkins &  
Pagliuca 1994, Heine & Kuteva 2002). The second possible mechanism of  
future evolvement is the more direct functional shift, i.e.  
“hypoanalysis” from a non-future to a future (cf. Bybee, Perkins &  
Pagliuca 1994: 232–236, Haspelmath 1998, Reinöhl & Himmelmann 2016:  
406–407).
It is known that futures which emerged by hypoanalysis often allow for  
gnomic and habitual readings, although in purely semantic terms these  
two meanings are difficult to link to future time reference (cf.  
Haspelmath 1998: 31–33). A functional shift from a present tense or a  
subjunctive mood to a future is usually triggered by the development  
of a new present tense or a new subjunctive mood, which restricts the  
domain of the inherited formations to formerly marginal uses such as  
prediction, generalised truths, and habitual actions. By contrast,  
gnomic or habitual readings are not attested for many subtypes of  
grammaticalisation futures, such as come-, go- or take-futures,  
although their sources are equally capable of expressing generalised  
truths or repeated actions.
Finally, the third factor potentially responsible for modal and  
aspectual readings in futures is the different behaviour of future  
tenses in the relevant language systems. It is known that the same  
language system may accommodate several functionally distinct futures,  
which may have emerged at different times and due to different  
mechanisms. In such a situation, it is natural to expect complex  
patterns of interaction between different future tenses which, in  
theory, might be responsible for different modal and aspectual  
flavours in futures (cf. Hedin 2000, Markopoulos 2009, Markopoulos et  
al. 2017 on Greek).

The workshop invites papers aimed at

(a)	identifying new factors potentially relevant to the emergence and  
subsequent development of modal and aspectual properties in futures,

(b)	describing patterns of interaction between these factors,

(c)	identifying recurrent patterns of interaction and establishing  
correlations with different kinds of modality and aspectuality in  
order to account for the typological variation.


Please send your abstract of approximately 300 words before 7  
September 2019 to eugen.hill at uni-koeln.de.



-- 
Prof. Dr. Eugen Hill

Historisch-Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft
Institut für Linguistik
Universität zu Köln
D-50923 Köln

Tel: +(49) 221 470 - 2282
Fax: +(49) 221 470 - 5947