27.4687, Calls: Syntax, Semanitcs/Switzerland

Tue Nov 15 20:06:35 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-4687. Tue Nov 15 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.4687, Calls: Syntax, Semanitcs/Switzerland

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Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2016 15:06:24
From: Natalia Serdobolskaya [serdobolskaya at gmail.com]
Subject: Definiteness, Possessivity and Exhaustivity: Formalizing Synchronic and Diachronic Connections

Full Title: Definiteness, Possessivity and Exhaustivity: Formalizing Synchronic and Diachronic Connections 

Date: 10-Sep-2017 - 13-Sep-2017
Location: Zurich, Switzerland 
Contact Person: Natalia Serdobolskaya Alexandra Simonenko
Meeting Email: serdobolskaya at gmail.com, sasha.simonenko at gmail.com

Linguistic Field(s): Semantics; Syntax 

Call Deadline: 19-Nov-2016 

Meeting Description:

Many formal semantic and typological studies have addressed the relation
between possession and definiteness, where definiteness encompasses
uniqueness- and antecedent-based reference resolution or weak and strong
definiteness in the sense of Schwarz (2009). 

>From the point of view of morphosyntax, there is a typological split between
languages that allow possessive and definiteness markers to co-occur within
one and the same DP, and those in which the markers in question are in
complementary distribution (for a rich typological survey see Haspelmath
1999).

On the semantic side, languages again split in that some have markers of
possession that impose an exhaustive quantification on the domain denoted by
the possessee nominal (in the sense that the resulting DP is normally taken to
denote the totality of individuals with the relevant nominal property related
to a given possessor), while other languages do not have such possessives. 

West Germanic pre-nominal possessors, French pre-nominal possessors, and
Hebrew and Arabic construct state possessives (e.g. Heller 2002,
Dobrovie-Sorin 2004, Barker 2011) all encode exhaustive quantification. In
languages and language groups such as Italian, Spanish, Slavic, Finno-Ugric,
Austronesian (Chung 2008), there is no possessive configuration with an
exhaustivity effect.

Moreover, there is evidence for the typological alignment of the
morphosyntactic and semantic splits identified above. That is, on the one
hand, it is precisely in those cases where possessive markers trigger
exhaustive quantification that they are in complementary distribution with
definiteness markers; on the other, languages which do not have
exhaustivity-triggering possessives, seem to mark, if at all, specificity (in
the sense of Enç (1991); partitive type in terms of von Heusinger 2002) rather
than definiteness.

The two types of systems – with article/possessive complementary distribution
and exhaustive possessives and with articles/possessive cooccurrence and no
exhaustive possessives – are not impermeable, however. For instance, Medieval
French went from a system with the pre-nominal possessives co-occurring with
the articles, to a system where the two series of markers are in complementary
distribution, and where the pre-nominal possessives have an exhaustive
interpretation.

The workshop focusses on answering the following questions:

- How much typological evidence is there for the alignment between
(non)-co-occurrence of definiteness and possessive markers and possessor
(non)exhaustivity?
- What are the possible semantic explanations of the ban on possessive and
definiteness markers' co-occurrence in light of the alignment of
morphosyntactic and semantic splits?
- What is the inventory of syntactico-semantic elements that would allow to
account for the independence of exhaustive quantification and possessive
relation cross-linguistically?
- What are the possible inventories of possessive constructions in languages
in terms of (non)exhausivity?
- How much diachronic evidence is there for the passage from non-exhaustive to
exhaustive possessive configurations?
- How can such transitions be formally modeled?
- How can we formally model the evolutionary developments leading from the
direct anaphora and possession markers to the definiteness and specificity
(partitivity) markers respectively?

2nd Call for Papers:

Invitation to a workshop at SLE 2017  “Definiteness, possessivity and
exhaustivity: formalizing synchronic and diachronic connections”

The workshop is planned as a part of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Societas
Linguistica Europaea (SLE), which will take place in Zürich, 10-13 September
2017. We cordially invite you to take part in the workshop and submit an
abstract (300 words, the deadline is 19 November 2016) for a 20+10 minute
presentation. At the moment, we are submitting the workshop proposal to the
organizing committee of the SLE. If the workshop is accepted, the expanded
version of the abstract (500 words) is resubmitted to the SLE organizing
committee (the deadline for this is 15 January 2017). Please forward this
letter to anyone who could be interested in this topic.

Important Dates:

19 November 2016: Deadline for submission of 300-word abstracts (excluding
references) to the workshop convenors (sasha.simonenko at gmail.com,
serdobolskaya at gmail.com). 
25 November 2016: Notification of acceptance by the workshop convenors and
submission of the workshop proposal to SLE
25 December 2016: Notification of acceptance of workshop proposals from SLE
organizers to workshop organizers
15 January 2017: Submission of full abstracts (500 words, excluding
references), taking into account any feedback from the reviewing procedure,
for review by SLE
31 March 2017: Notification of acceptance of individual workshop contributions
10-13 September 2017: SLE conference

Organizers:

Anne Carlier (Université Lille 3)
Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin (Université Paris 7 Diderot)
Monique Dufresne (Queen's University)
Natalia Serdobolskaya (Russian State University for the Humanities/Moscow
State University of Education)
Alexandra Simonenko (FWO/Ghent University)

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