27.3320, Calls: Historical Ling, Semantics, Ling Theories, Psycholing, Typology/Germany

Thu Aug 18 16:41:41 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-3320. Thu Aug 18 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.3320, Calls: Historical Ling, Semantics, Ling Theories, Psycholing, Typology/Germany

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Date: Thu, 18 Aug 2016 12:41:06
From: Marie-Luise Popp [marie_luise.popp at uni-leipzig.de]
Subject: Polysemy and Coercion of Clause-Embedding Predicates

Full Title: Polysemy and Coercion of Clause-Embedding Predicates 

Date: 08-Mar-2017 - 10-Mar-2017
Location: Saarbrücken, Germany 
Contact Person: Marie-Luise Popp
Meeting Email: marie_luise.popp at uni-leipzig.de

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Linguistic Theories; Psycholinguistics; Semantics; Typology 

Call Deadline: 31-Aug-2016 

Meeting Description:

Unlike typical Standard Average European languages such as German or English,
many under-researched languages display only a small inventory of
clause-embedding (or ''complement-taking'') predicates (CEPs), with the
consequence that many of these predicates are highly polysemous or vague
(e.g., nɔrkatɛ (Lonwolwol; Paton 1973): 'grasp, believe, trust, remember
etc.'). But even in languages with a richer inventory of CEPs, polysemy
appears in many facets (e.g., English tell 'narrate, order, inform' or Spanish
esperar 'hope, wish, expect, demand'). The polysemy of the predicates may
influence their complementation patterns (e.g., know that vs. know how to):
often, only polysemous CEPs show the full range of the language-specific
complementation patterns, with close associations of complementation types and
specific readings of the polysemous CEP. Other distributional properties are
also affected by polysemy, for instance: (a) the dual use of 'begin', 'start',
'stop', 'promise', 'threaten' and possibly other predicates as raising and
control predicates; (b) the restriction of NEG-raising with Spanish esperar to
its 'expect' reading (Popp 2016); (c) the reading-specific selection of
mood/modality in the embedded clause (Spanish sentir: 'feel' with indicative,
'regret' with subjunctive).

Predicates that do not exhibit clausal arguments in their base entry may be
turned into CEPs, e.g., verbs of sound emission (shriek → shriek that ...).
Here, notions such as ''coercion'' (Pustejovsky 1995, Asher 2011), ''lexical
subordination'' (Levin & Rapoport 1988) or ''conflation'' (Talmy 1985) may be
brought into play. The syntactic flexibility of restricted CEPs can also be
enhanced by coercion (e.g., the factive German CEP bedauern 'regret' may be
used parenthetically if interpreted as 'utter with regret').

The workshop is meant as discussion forum for researchers from different
backgrounds (especially semantics, lexical typology, corpus/computational
linguistics, psycholinguistics, historical linguistics and
lexicology/lexicography).

Invited speaker: Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten (Simon Fraser University,
Vancouver)

Organizers: Marie-Luise Popp & Barbara Stiebels (University of Leipzig)

References:

Asher, Nicholas. 2011. Lexical meaning in context: A web of words. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Levin, Beth &  Tova R. Rapoport. 1988. Lexical subordination. Proceedings of
the 24th Annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS). 275-289.
Popp, Marie-Luise. 2016. NEG-raising in cross-linguistic perspective. MA
thesis, University of Leipzig
Pustejovsky, James. 1995. The generative lexicon. Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press.
Talmy, Leonard. 1985. Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical
forms. In Timothy Shopen (ed.) , Language typology and syntactic description:
Grammatical categories and the lexicon. Volume 3. 57-149. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

2nd Call for Papers:

Extended deadline for submission : August 31, 2016

We invite submission of abstracts for 30 minute talks (including discussion)
dealing with the following questions (inter alia):

- Which patterns of polysemy can be observed in CEPs? Are there
predictable/systematic patterns of polysemy?
- Are there cross-linguistic tendencies of co-lexification in CEPs? The CLICS
database (http://clics.lingpy.org/), for instance, reveals that 'ask' often
shows up with the two readings 'question' and 'request'. Likewise, 'believe'
and 'think' and 'know' and 'understand', respectively, are co-lexified in
quite a number of languages.
- Which distributional properties of CEPs are affected by polysemy?
- Which coercion patterns yield CEPs or affect CEPs? Does the availability of
coercion depend on general conflation patterns in the respective languages? Do
CEPs resulting from coercion exhibit specific complementation patterns?
- How should the polysemy of CEPs be modeled?
- Are there specific diachronic processes that lead to the rise or loss of
polysemy in CEPs? Does the emergence or disappearance of synonymous or
semantically similar CEPs play a role? How does the rise or loss of polysemy
relate to the complementation pattern of the respective predicates?
- Which role does the polysemy of CEPs play for their processing or
acquisition?
- Which patterns of polysemy copying of CEPs can be observed in language
contact?

Please submit a one-page abstract (single spaced, 12pt; examples and
references can be added on a second page) as pdf document to Marie-Luise Popp
(marie_luise.popp at uni-leipzig.de) by August 31, 2016.

Workshop speakers have to register for the DGfS conference and are not
supposed to speak at more than one workshop.

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