29.3171, Calls: Gen Ling, Pragmatics, Psycholing, Semantics, Typology/Germany

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-29-3171. Tue Aug 14 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.3171, Calls: Gen Ling, Pragmatics, Psycholing, Semantics, Typology/Germany

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Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2018 17:57:45
From: Carla Bombi [everett at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Sorting Out the Concepts behind Definiteness

 
Full Title: Sorting Out the Concepts behind Definiteness 

Date: 06-Mar-2019 - 08-Mar-2019
Location: Bremen, Germany 
Contact Person: Carla Bombi
Meeting Email: definiteness.concepts at gmail.com
Web Site: https://sites.google.com/view/sortingoutdefiniteness/home 

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics; Semantics; Typology 

Call Deadline: 23-Aug-2018 

Meeting Description:

There is no agreement in the literature as to which and how many concepts are
needed to capture the meaning of definite descriptions, whether intra- or
cross-linguistically. A continuing controversy surrounds even the most
agreed-upon notions like uniqueness and familiarity, while novel evidence has
been put forth to support the relevance of various other notions  established
or new), such as (in)determinacy (Coppock & Beaver 2015), salience (von
Heusinger 1997; Barlew 2014) and maximal informativeness (von Fintel et al.
2014). 

>From a theoretical perspective, the question arises whether any of these
notions can be dispensed with. Much work in the tradition of formal semantics,
for instance, maintains that familiarity is either theoretically unappealing
(Elbourne 2013) or that it can be derived from uniqueness (Beaver & Coppock
2015). Despite these and other reductionist attempts, theories of definiteness
must ultimately face the complexity of the empirical landscape—both intra- and
cross-linguistic: definite expressions come in different forms (weak and
strong articles, demonstratives, bare NPs, pronouns) as well as flavors
(referential vs attributive, situation-based vs anaphoric, weak, affective,
etc.). Important steps towards the understanding of this complexity have been
made (Chierchia 1998; Dayal 2004; Schwarz 2009), but many issues remain open
(such as the precise division of labor between semantics and pragmatics) and
new ones keep arising (such as the problem of the co-existence of definite
bare NPs and non-demonstrative definite descriptions within a single language;
Jiang 2018).

The goal of this workshop is to shed new light on these and related issues. We
welcome abstracts dealing with the semantics of definiteness from fresh
angles, whether grammatically (less explored construction or phrase types),
language-wise (cross-linguistic semantics, less studied languages), or
methodologically (quantitative approaches– experimental or corpus-based). The
core question of the workshop ''Which concepts are needed to capture the
meaning of definiteness?'' Other relevant subquestions include:

- What are the notions behind different types of definite descriptions (weak
vs strong articles, articles vs demonstratives, definite descriptions vs bare
NPs)? Can the claim that uniqueness is part of expresssions such as weak
definites (Aguilar-Guevara 2014) or demonstrative descriptions (Elbourne 2008)
be maintained (cf. Šimík 2016)?

- What semantics do demonstrative descriptions contribute in contrast to
definite descriptions? Notions such as anti-uniqueness (Simonenko 2014),
contrast (Löbner 1985), affectivity (Davis & Potts 2010) have been proposed,
but their status/cross-linguistic availability remains to be explored.

- Bare NPs in articleless languages are widely believed to be able to be
semantically definite (Dayal 2004; Geist 2010), but some recent work shows
that this stance might need to be reconsidered (Heim 2011; Borik 2018; Šimík &
Demian in prep).

- What is the status of the implications carried by definite descriptions?
Concepts such as uniqueness are believed to be presupposed, at least among
linguists (Elbourne 2013), but recent experimental findings suggest a more
pragmatic source of uniqueness/maximality (De Veaugh-Geiss et al. 2018).

- There are a number of approaches analyzing definite expressions in terms of
the “cognitive activation'' of their referent in discourse (Gundel et al.
2001). Can their generalizations also be captured by formal semantic analyses?
If so, how are the two types of approaches to be reconciled?

Invited Speakers:

Liz Coppock (Boston University)
Peter Jenks (UC Berkeley)

Organizers:

Carla Bombi (Universität Potsdam)
Radek Šimík (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)


2nd Call for Papers:

We invite abstracts for 30-minute talks (20+10) that address issues relevant
to the meeting. Abstract requirements: anonymous (not identifying the
author(s) in any way), 2 A4 pages + 3rd page for (selected) references
(required), 2,54cm/1-inch margins on all sides, 12pt, Times New Roman, single
spaced, default letter spacing, examples in the running text. At most two
abstracts may be submitted for the whole DGfS event, at most one
single-authored.

Submission link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sortingoutdefinitene
Extended deadline: 23 August 2018




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