27.4570, Calls: Phonology, Pragmatics, Semantics, Syntax/Norway

Tue Nov 8 20:40:38 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-4570. Tue Nov 08 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.4570, Calls: Phonology, Pragmatics, Semantics, Syntax/Norway

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Date: Tue, 08 Nov 2016 15:40:30
From: Pritty Patel-Grosz [pritty at alum.mit.edu]
Subject: Non-At-Issue Meaning and Information Structure

Full Title: Non-At-Issue Meaning and Information Structure 
Short Title: NAIS 

Date: 08-May-2017 - 10-May-2017
Location: Oslo, Norway, Norway 
Contact Person: Pritty Patel-Grosz
Meeting Email: pritty at alum.mit.edu
Web Site: https://osloxprag.wordpress.com/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Phonology; Pragmatics; Semantics; Syntax 

Call Deadline: 15-Nov-2016 

Meeting Description:

Non-at-issue meaning, such as presuppositions and conventional implicatures
(cf. Potts 2015 for a recent discussion), and information structural
phenomena, such as topic, focus and givenness (cf. Krifka 2008), are topics in
their own right that have often been investigated independently from each
other. However, recent approaches to discourse and information structure (such
as Simons et al. 2011, Tonhauser et al. 2013, and Beaver et al. to appear)
have shifted the focus onto the connection between (non-)at-issueness and an
implicit or explicit Question Under Discussion (QUD, see Roberts 1996, 2012,
Büring 2003).

We propose a workshop that aims at bringing together current research on
different interactions between non-at-issue meaning (in particular,
presuppositions and conventional implicatures) and information structure (i.e.
topic, focus and givenness). In this workshop, we explicitly focus on the
interconnectedness of these fields of research (cf. Sæbø 2016). We aim at a
discussing them beyond (but not excluding) much-exploited connections (such as
the analysis of prosodic focus or sentential background as presupposition
triggers).

Invited Speakers:

Sigrid Beck (University of Tübingen)
Regine Eckardt (University of Konstanz)
Manfred Krifka (Humboldt University)
Craige Roberts (Ohio State University)
Kjell Johan Sæbø (University of Oslo)
Kriszta Szendroi (University College London)

Commentators:

Dag Haug (University of Oslo)
Nicholas Allott (University of Oslo)
Cathrine Fabricius Hansen (University of Oslo)
Atle Grønn (University of Oslo)
Nadine Bade (University of Tübingen)
Elena Callegari (University of Oslo) 

Panel Discussion:

Nadine Bade (University of Tübingen)
Kjell Johan Sæbø (University of Oslo)
Pritty Patel-Grosz & Patrick Grosz (University of Oslo)
Per Erik Solberg (University of Oslo)
Uli Sauerland (ZAS)
Matthew Gotham (University of Oslo)

Organisers:

Nadine Bade (University of Tuebingen)
Patrick Grosz (University of Oslo)
Pritty Patel-Grosz (University of Oslo)
Uli Sauerland (ZAS)

Final Call for Papers:

We invite submissions for 20-minute talks plus 10 minutes for discussion.
Abstracts must be anonymous, in PDF format, 2 pages (A4 or letter), in a font
size no less then 12pt, and with margins of 1 inch/2.5 cm. Please submit
abstracts via EasyChair (see link below) no later than November 15, 2016.

Abstract submission link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=nais2017

We invite submissions not only from the field of semantics, but also from
syntax, intonational phonology, and other subfields that address the
connection of (non-)at-issueness and information structure. 

Topics of interest (non-exhaustive) include:

- What constraints on information structure (e.g. Givenness vs.
F(ocus)-marking) can be observed in sentences with truth-conditionally vacuous
presupposition triggers (or conventional-implicature triggers)? (E.g. again,
also/too and even, but also evaluative adverbs such as ''luckily'',
''unfortunately'', ''sadly'' and ''bizarrely''.)

- What are the information structural properties of presupposed complement
clauses (i.e. complements of factive predicates), e.g. Bill is glad that John
bought the red shoes. (factive) vs. Bill is certain that John bought the red
shoes. (non-factive) How does embedded information structure interact with the
matrix predicate (if at all)?

- What type of interactions can be observed between non-canonical speech acts
(e.g. wh-exclamatives like ''How very much he loved her!'' or V1-exclamatives
like ''Boy, did he love her!''), information structure, and elements that
encode non-at-issue meaning (such as the interjections boy, man and wow).

- What is the role of clausal subordination vs. superordination in managing
the discourse (via information structure) and in determining
(non-)at-issueness? E.g. how does the sentence ''The roof is damaged, because
it hailed'' differ from ''It must have hailed, because the roof is damaged''
in terms of information structure and at-issueness?

- What is the role of parenthetical phrases (which presumably convey
non-at-issue meaning) with respect to information structure? For instance, how
does the sentence ''John, my best friend, is coming for dinner'' differ from
the sentence ''My best friend, John, is coming for dinner''? Which
regularities can be observed?

- How does word order (which is often linked to information structure) impact
at-issueness? E.g. are scrambled phrases less ‘at issue’ (in some sense or
other) than phrases in their base position? Is there a syntactic layer that is
designated for 'non-at-issue' content or a syntactic layer that is reserved
for 'at issue' content?

- What is the range of Questions Under Discussion that permit particular
presupposition triggers in their answers (such as the aspectual verb continue
in ''John continued to dance'', a temporal before-clause as in ''John danced
before going to bed'', or the implicative verb manage in ''John managed to
dance'')?

- What kind of interactions can be observed between discourse particles (such
as German ja, doch and wohl), which are another type of truth-conditionally
vacuous triggers of non-at-issue meaning, and the information structure of the
clauses that contain them?

- What type of information structure is correlated with the use of epithets
(such as the jerk), swear words (such as damn) and other cases of expressive
non-at-issue meaning?

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