[Lingtyp] CfP - Counterfactuals: Families of constructions - Workshop at SLE 57, Helsinki, 21-24 August 2024
Anvita Abbi
anvitaabbi at gmail.com
Wed Sep 20 19:01:28 UTC 2023
A very good account of Counter factuals across typologically and
genetically distinct and similar languages is given in here The grammar of
‘non-realization’ | John Benjamins (jbe-platform.com)
<https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/sl.18044.kut>
Anvita
On Wed, Sep 20, 2023 at 3:11 AM Paolo Ramat <paoram at unipv.it> wrote:
> Dear Tom, to your list of references concerning counterfactuals you may add
> Zlatka Guentchéva (éd.), *L’énonciation **médiatisée, *Peeters, Louvain
> - Paris 1996, which deals ,among other topics, with adverbs introducing
> counterfactuality, such as *allegedly, supposedly*
> See also Paolo Ramat & Davide Ricca, 'Sentence adverbs in the languages of
> Europe' , in J. van der Auwera (ed.), *Adverbial Constructions in the
> Languages of Europe, *Mouton de Gruyter 1998. Counterfactual ADVs may
> impact on the syntax of the sentence.
>
> Best,
> Paolo
> Prof. Dr. Paolo Ramat
> Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Socio corrispondente
> 'Academia Europaea'
> 'Societas Linguistica Europaea', Honorary Member
> Università di Pavia (retired)
> Istituto Universitario di Studi Superiori (IUSS Pavia) (retired)
>
> piazzetta Arduino 11 - I 27100 Pavia
> ##39 0382 27027
> 347 044 98 44
>
>
> Il giorno mar 19 set 2023 alle ore 17:23 Tom Bossuyt <Tom.Bossuyt at ugent.be>
> ha scritto:
>
>> Dear colleagues,
>>
>> We hereby send you the Call for Papers of our proposed workshop
>> “Counterfactuals: Families of constructions” at SLE 57 in Helsinki, 21 – 24
>> August 2024.
>>
>>
>>
>> Convenors: Jesus Olguin Martinez (Illinois State University), Tom Bossuyt
>> (Ghent University), Ellison Luk (KU Leuven)
>>
>>
>>
>> Keywords: counterfactuals, usage-based approach, grammar network, family
>> of constructions, conditionals, insubordination, typology
>>
>>
>>
>> Deadline: provisional 300-word abstracts by 10 November 2023.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Description
>>
>> Counterfactual constructions convey the speaker’s belief that the
>> actualization of a situation was potential – possible, desirable, imminent,
>> or intended –, but that it did not take place, i.e. it did not belong to
>> the actual world (Verstraete 2005: 231). While counterfactuals have mostly
>> been studied in formal-semantic frameworks (e.g., Baker 1970; Iatridou
>> 2000; Ippolito 2003; Karttunen 1970; Kratzer 1981; Lewis 1973; Reinhart
>> 1976; von Fintel 2001; inter alia), few studies have explored
>> counterfactuals from a functional perspective (but see Olguin Martinez &
>> Lester 2021; Van linden & Verstraete 2008; Verstraete & Luk 2021). The
>> goal of this workshop is to help fill this gap. Counterfactuals are
>> typically associated with the kind of conditional construction exemplified
>> in (1). However, they may show up in other guises as well, e.g.
>> hypothetical manner constructions as in (2), various non-prototypical
>> conditionals such as the concessive-conditional example in (3), or ‘if not
>> for NP’ constructions as in (4).
>>
>>
>>
>> (1) If I had known that, I wouldn’t have appointed him.
>>
>>
>>
>> (2) The child is crying, as if I had hit him.
>>
>>
>>
>> (3) Even if I had told you, you wouldn’t have come.
>>
>>
>>
>> Khmer (Austro-Asiatic)
>>
>> (4) baeu kom baːn kun bawn preah
>> loːk cuaj,
>>
>> if NEG get merit grace
>> lord monk help
>>
>> ‘Without the help of God,
>>
>>
>>
>> srac bat tev haeuj.
>>
>> ready disappear go already
>>
>> I would have been lost.’ (Haiman 2011: 226)
>>
>>
>>
>> Apart from complex sentences, counterfactuality can also be expressed by
>> simple clauses. In many languages, these are structurally similar to the
>> main clause of a conditional counterfactual construction as in (5) and (6) (Van
>> linden & Verstraete 2008: 1888).
>>
>>
>>
>> (5) I should have done it!
>>
>>
>>
>> (6) I would have come this morning!
>>
>>
>>
>> Other languages have a construction that could be regarded as a
>> counterfactual conditional construction with an elided main clause as in
>> (7) (Kawachi 2014: 91). These instances are known in the literature as
>> ‘counterfactual wishes’ and seem to be the result of insubordination (Evans
>> & Wanatabe 2016).
>>
>>
>>
>> (7) If only she had come!
>>
>>
>>
>> The counterfactual constructions discussed above form a FAMILY OF
>> CONSTRUCTIONS. In recent years, this notion has established itself in
>> Construction Grammar as a label for sets of constructions with a similar
>> meaning or function, often despite striking differences of form (Diessel
>> 2019: 199-200; Leuschner 2020; Ruiz de Mendoza Ibanez et al. 2017; Vander
>> Haegen et al. 2022). Family resemblances should be considered a
>> synchronic reflection of the ongoing diachronic emergence of the
>> constructions in question. Unlike the derivation processes assumed in the
>> classic version of generative grammar, associative connections between
>> constructions reflect the language users’ experience with particular
>> patterns (Croft 2001; Diessel 2019). Analyzing families of constructions
>> can allow us to formulate not only hypotheses about how existing schemas
>> may be used to categorize novel linguistic experiences, but also hypotheses
>> about the linear arrangement of linguistic elements, and associative
>> connections between individual lexemes and specific slots of constructional
>> schemas.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Aims of the workshop
>>
>> The workshop will bring together original research that contributes to
>> our understanding of the range and limits of crosslinguistic variation of
>> counterfactual constructions. Thanks to descriptions of the forms,
>> syntactic strategies, and semantic profiles of such constructions in a
>> given language, family, or macro-area, the workshop will pave the way for a
>> typology of counterfactuals. Potential contributions include, but are not
>> restricted to, the following:
>>
>>
>>
>> 1. TAM values. What are the profiles of the TAM values that are
>> associated with counterfactual marking (e.g., irrealis, frustrative, past
>> tense; cf. Overall 2017: 492; von Prince 2019; von Prince et al. 2022)? How
>> do the semantics of certain language-particular “irrealis” categories and
>> counterfactuality relate to each other? If a language contains more than
>> one type of counterfactual construction, do they occur with the same TAM
>> values?
>>
>>
>>
>> 2. Clause-linking markers. If a language contains multi-word
>> counterfactual connectives, what are the building blocks of the multi-word
>> expression? What motivates their co-occurrence? What determines the linear
>> order of the building blocks of multi-word counterfactual connectives (i.e.
>> sequential relations; Diessel 2019: 15)?
>>
>>
>>
>> 3. Diachrony. What are the diachronic sources of grammatical markers used
>> for encoding counterfactual constructions?
>>
>>
>>
>> 4. Optionality. Clause-linking markers and/or TAM values may be optional
>> in that can be omitted without affecting the meaning of the construction.
>> What are the factors that may lead speakers to omit TAM or clause-linking
>> markers from a counterfactual construction?
>>
>>
>>
>> 5. Language contact. Are counterfactual constructions prone to diffusion?
>> What are the mechanisms involved in the development of counterfactuals
>> through language contact?
>>
>>
>>
>> 6. Filler-slot relations. In many languages, speakers can choose to
>> verbalize counterfactual thoughts/experiences in different ways (e.g., If
>> only she had gone! vs. I wish she had gone!). The question is: Do these
>> counterfactual constructions appear with the same verbs in a particular
>> slot? The co-occurrence patterning of lexemes and constructions is
>> functionally motivated (Gries & Stefanowitsch 2004: 99), giving rise to
>> a joint distribution of lexemes in constructions that are known in the
>> literature as filler-slot relations (Diessel 2019: 20).
>>
>>
>>
>> 7. Discourse functions. Counterfactuals may develop intriguing discourse
>> functions. For instance, in many languages around the world, hypothetical
>> manner constructions may develop into insubordinate constructions with
>> exclamative force (e.g. as if he had a lot of money!; Olguin Martinez 2021).
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Please send provisional abstracts of no more than 300 words (excluding
>> references) in PDF format by 10 November 2023 to the following email
>> addresses:
>>
>>
>>
>> jfolguinmartinez at gmail.com
>>
>> tom.bossuyt at ugent.be
>>
>> ellisonluk at gmail.com
>>
>>
>>
>> If the workshop is approved, authors will be asked to submit revised
>> 500-word abstracts according to the SLE guidelines.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> References
>>
>> Baker, C. Lee. 1970. Problems of polarity in counterfactuals. In Jerrold
>> Sadock & Anthony Vanek (eds.), Studies Presented to Robert B. Lees by his
>> Students, 1-15. Edmonton: PIL Monograph Series 1, Linguistic Research Inc.
>>
>> Croft, William. 2001. Radical construction grammar. Oxford: Oxford
>> University Press.
>>
>> Diessel, Holger. 2019. The grammar network. How linguistic structure is
>> shaped by language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
>>
>> Evans, Nicholas & Honoré Watanabe. 2016. The dynamics of insubordination:
>> An overview. In Nicholas Evans & Honoré Watanabe (eds.) Insubordination,
>> 1-38. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
>>
>> Gries, Stefan Th. & Anatol Stefanowitsch. 2004. Extending
>> collostructional analysis: A corpus-based perspectives on ‘alternations’.
>> International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9. 97-129.
>>
>> Haiman, John. 2011. Cambodian (Khmer). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John
>> Benjamins.
>>
>> Iatridou, Sabine. 2000. The grammatical ingredients of counterfactuality.
>> Linguistic Inquiry 31. 231-270.
>>
>> Ippolito, Michela. 2003. Presuppositions and implicatures in
>> counterfactuals. Natural Language Semantics 11. 145-186.
>>
>> Karttunen, Lauri. 1971. Subjunctive conditionals and polarity reversals.
>> Papers in Linguistics 4. 279-296.
>>
>> Kawachi, Kazuhiro. 2015. Insubordinated conditionals in Kupsapiny
>> (Kupsapiiny, Kupsabiny). Asian and African Languages and Linguistics 9.
>> 65-104.
>>
>> Kratzer, Angelika. 1981. Partition and revision: The semantics of
>> counterfactuals. Journal of Philosophical Logic 10. 201-216.
>>
>> Leuschner, Torsten. 2020. Concessive conditionals as a family of
>> constructions. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 34. 235-247.
>>
>> Lewis, David. 1973. Counterfactuals. Oxford: Blackwell.
>>
>> Olguin Martinez, Jesus. 2021. Hypothetical manner constructions in
>> world-wide perspective. Journal Linguistic typology at the crossroads 1.
>> 2-33.
>>
>> Olguin Martinez, Jesus & Nicholas Lester. 2021. A quantitative analysis
>> of counterfactual conditionals in the world’s languages. Italian Journal of
>> Linguistics 33. 147-182.
>>
>> Overall, Simon. 2017. A typology of frustrative marking in Amazonian
>> languages. In Alexandra Aikhenvald & R.M.W. Dixon (eds.), The Cambridge
>> handbook of linguistic typology, 477-512. Cambridge: Cambridge University
>> Press.
>>
>> Reinhart, Tanya. 1976. Polarity reversal: Logic or pragmatics? Linguistic
>> Inquiry 7. 697-705.
>>
>> Ruiz de Mendoza Ibanez, Francisco Jose, Alba Luzondo Oyon, & Paula Perez
>> Sobrino. 2017. Investigating the construction. In Francisco Jose Ruiz de
>> Mendoza Ibanez, Alba Luzondo Oyon, & Paula Perez Sobrino, Constructing
>> families of constructions: Analytical perspectives and theoretical
>> challenges, 1-16. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
>>
>> Vander Haegen, Flor, Tom Bossuyt, & Torsten Leuschner. 2022. Emerging
>> into your family of constructions: German [IRR was] ‘no matter what’.
>> Constructions and frames 14. 150-180.
>>
>> Van linden, An & Jean-Christophe Verstraete. 2008. The nature and origin
>> of counterfactuality in simple clauses: Cross-linguistic evidence. Journal
>> of Pragmatics 40. 1865-1895.
>>
>> von Fintel, Kai. 2001. Counterfactuals in a dynamic context. In Michael
>> Kenstowicz (ed.), Ken Hale: A life in language, 123-152. Cambridge, MA: MIT
>> Press.
>>
>> von Prince, Kilu. 2019. Counterfactuality and past. Linguistics and
>> Philosophy 42. 577-615.
>>
>> von Prince, Kilu, Ana Krajinovic, & Manfred Krifka. 2022. Irrealis is
>> real. Language 98. 221-249.
>>
>> Verstraete, Jean-Christophe. 2005. The semantics and pragmatics of
>> composite mood marking: The non-Pama-Nyungan languages of Northern
>> Australia. Linguistic Typology 9. 223-268.
>>
>> Verstraete, Jean-Christophe & Ellison Luk. 2021. Shaking up
>> counterfactuality: Even closer to the linguistic facts. Theoretical
>> Linguistics 47. 287-296.
>>
>>
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