21.3630, Calls: Slavic Langs, Semantics, Syntax/United Kingdom

[linguist at LINGUISTLIST.ORG]

LINGUIST List: Vol-21-3630. Tue Sep 14 2010. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 21.3630, Calls: Slavic Langs, Semantics, Syntax/United Kingdom

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Eastern Michigan U <aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U <hdry at linguistlist.org>
 
Reviews: Monica Macaulay, U of Wisconsin-Madison  
Eric Raimy, U of Wisconsin-Madison  
Joseph Salmons, U of Wisconsin-Madison  
Anja Wanner, U of Wisconsin-Madison  
       <reviews at linguistlist.org> 

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org/

The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University, 
and donations from subscribers and publishers.

Editor for this issue: Di Wdzenczny <di at linguistlist.org>
================================================================  

LINGUIST is pleased to announce the launch of an exciting new feature:  
Easy Abstracts! Easy Abs is a free abstract submission and review facility 
designed to help conference organizers and reviewers accept and process 
abstracts online.  Just go to: http://www.linguistlist.org/confcustom, 
and begin your conference customization process today! With Easy Abstracts, 
submission and review will be as easy as 1-2-3!

===========================Directory==============================  

1)
Date: 12-Sep-2010
From: Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka < iw.plisiecka at gmail.com >
Subject: Aspect and Performativity in Slavic Languages IPrA Panel
 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2010 23:34:42
From: Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka [iw.plisiecka at gmail.com]
Subject: Aspect and Performativity in Slavic Languages IPrA Panel

E-mail this message to a friend:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/emailmessage/verification.cfm?iss=21-3630.html&submissionid=2647695&topicid=3&msgnumber=1
  

Full Title: Aspect and Performativity in Slavic Languages IPrA Panel 

Date: 03-Jul-2011 - 08-Jul-2011
Location: Manchester, United Kingdom 
Contact Person: Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka
Meeting Email: iw.plisiecka at gmail.com

Linguistic Field(s): Semantics; Syntax 

Language Family(ies): Slavic Subgroup 

Call Deadline: 15-Sep-2010 

Meeting Description:

Aspect and Performativity in Slavic Languages (and Beyond)

Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka and Igor Z Zagar - IPrA 2011 Panel 

Through discussions gathered in this panel we would like to contrastively
explore the relation between formal grammatical features, such as tense, 
aspect, Aktionsart, mood, voice, and the corresponding (potential) 
performativity in linguistic expressions. 

2nd Call for Papers

We invite papers focused on the relation between performativity and 
grammar: 
- the relation between tense, aspect, Aktionsart, mood, voice, 
and 
- the corresponding (potential) performativity in linguistic expressions. 

Exploration of the topic extends into: 
- speech-act oriented research traditions outside the Anglo-Saxon world 
- contrastive analysis of Anglo-Saxon and Continental research on 
performativity 
- past and contemporary reflection on the actional nature of language 
independent of the Austinian tradition 

Deadlines: 

Full texts and proposals in the form of abstracts should be sent by 15 
September 2010 to the panel conveners: 

Igor Z. Zagar (igor.zzagar at gmail.com), 
Educational Research Institute & University of Maribor, Slovenia 
& Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka (iw.plisiecka at gmail.com), University of Lodz, 
Poland 

Conveners' statement: 
We believe that performativity is still an issue worthy of exploration. We 
would like to emphasize speech-act oriented research traditions outside the
Anglo-Saxon world, next to better-known work by Emile Benveniste, 
contemporary to Austin, we would also like to draw attention to even earlier 
independent reflection on the actional nature of language, e.g. that of 
Skrabec (1911) in Slovenian or Koschmieder (1934) in Polish. 
In the Anglo-Saxon world 'the performative' is directly associated with John
Austin's theory of speech acts, subsequently developed by John Searle, 
which concentrates on the institutional aspect in speech action. In turn our 
Slavic perspective seems to tend towards grammar and logic-oriented 
issues and focuses on the syntax-pragmatics, form-function relations. 
In describing what is happening, what is going on 'right now' as we speak, 
all Slavs would use the present tense of an imperfective and not a 
perfective verb. It, therefore, should not come as a surprise that in all Slavic 
languages performatives usually take the imperfective aspect. Dickey (2000: 
177-178), however, quite contentiously observes that the North Slavic 
languages all allow coincidence of simultaneous actions with performative 
verbs and certain verba dicendi (taking the perfective aspect [sic!]) to some 
degree, 'while the South Slavic languages, with the exception of Slovene, 
almost never do. Within the North Slavic languages, West Slavic exhibits a 
much higher degree of coincidence with performative verbs [...] than East 
Slavic does.' 
There is thus an unsolved puzzle whether performativity can be directly 
related to tense and aspect and accounted for in a systematic way. Is the 
form-meaning of a performative necessarily either highly institutional or 
vague? To quote Stanislav Skrabec, a 19th-century Slovene linguist, '[a]s 
long as we are only promising (imperfective), we have not promised 
anything yet, and if we are not (doing anything) but promising 
(imperfective), we cannot take anything as having been promised.' 
Faced with such problems, in this panel we would like to focus on Slavic
languages, whose rich and ramified morphology has not been widely 
documented with regard to the morphology-syntax-semantics-pragmatics 
interface. However, we believe that contrasting varied, even potentially 
contradictory Slavic data (cf. H. Galton's The Main Functions of the Slavic 
Verbal Aspect (1976) and S.M. Dickey's Parameters of Slavic Aspect 
(2000)), with related data from other language families can shed new light 
on the still mysterious and elusive concept of the performative value. In 
particular, we would like to explore the potential of converging Slavic 
linguistics research on tense, aspect and mood with the Anglo-Saxon 
research on related formal features of performativity.

This call is part of a bigger project whose aim is a separate volume devoted 
to aspect and performativity in Slavic and other Indo-European languages, 
which is to be published with John Benjamins' Pragmatics & Beyond New 
Series.





-----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-21-3630