29.360, Calls: Anthro Ling, Gen Ling, Lang Doc, Syntax, Typology/France

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-29-360. Sun Jan 21 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.360, Calls: Anthro Ling, Gen Ling, Lang Doc, Syntax, Typology/France

Moderators: linguist at linguistlist.org (Damir Cavar, Malgorzata E. Cavar)
Reviews: reviews at linguistlist.org (Helen Aristar-Dry, Robert Coté,
                                   Michael Czerniakowski)
Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Kenneth Steimel <ken at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2018 14:57:23
From: Marine Vuillermet [marine.vuillermet at cnrs.fr]
Subject: Lest we Miss Them: Precautionary/Apprehensive Clauses

 
Full Title: Lest we Miss Them: Precautionary/Apprehensive Clauses 

Date: 03-Sep-2018 - 05-Sep-2018
Location: Paris, France 
Contact Person: Marine Vuillermet
Meeting Email: Marine.VUILLERMET at cnrs.fr
Web Site: https://swl8.sciencesconf.org/resource/page/id/6 

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics; General Linguistics; Language Documentation; Syntax; Typology 

Call Deadline: 31-Jan-2018 

Meeting Description:

This workshop will bring together scholars primarily working on lesser-known
languages to study the crosslinguistic variation of precautioning clauses
(also known as apprehensive or 'lest' clauses) with a focus on syntactic
issues. A workshop description and guidelines for abstract submission are
available on the conference website, https://swl8.sciencesconf.org.

Convenors: Marine Vuillermet (DDL-CNRS, Lyon), Eva Schultze-Berndt (U
Manchester)


2nd Call for Papers:

Workshop to be held at SWL8, Sept 3-5, INALCO, Paris
Conference URL: https://swl8.sciencesconf.org

The topic of this workshop are precautioning clauses, i.e. subordinate clauses
encoding an undesirable event that is to be avoided, indicated by specialised
markers, as in (1). 

(1) Ese Ejja (Vuillermet to appear)
E-’bakwa   iñawewa iña po-ani, (...) [e’bio=wasijje e-poki kwajejje].
NPF-child  dog    grab be-PRS  jungle=ALL PREC-go  PREC
‘The child is grabbing the dog [lest it go to the jungle].’

Precautioning clauses systematically associate with an explicit preemptive
clause, typically with assertive (1) or directive illocutionary force (2).
Lichtenberk (1995) further subdivides the PRECAUTIONING function into the
AVERTIVE (2a) and IN-CASE functions (2b). The two differ in that there is a
direct causal link between the two propositions only in the former but not in
the latter. Many authors describe precautioning clauses as “negative purpose
clauses” even though such a term does not cover the IN-CASE function.

(2)
a. Take your umbrella lest you get wet / so that you won’t get wet.
b. Take your umbrella lest/in case it rains / ??so that it won’t rain.

An example of a dedicated precautioning morpheme is the _lest_ (archaic) in
English also illustrated in (2). Though such specialised constructions seem to
be rare in the Eurasian and African areas (Vuillermet 2015; Schmidtke-Bode
2009:130), they are not rare cross-linguistically: Schmidtke-Bode (2009)
identifies them in 19 out of 80 languages, and a recent survey of 56 South
American languages reports 18 languages with precautioning clauses (Vuillermet
2017). 

Languages with no dedicated morphology still have numerous precautioning
strategies, marked by connectives such as ‘if not+might’, ‘otherwise’, and
‘before’ as in _Put the milk into the fridge before it goes off_. These may or
may not be restricted to undesirable consequences. The notion of
undesirability may also arise, somewhat surprisingly, from morphemes that
originally only encode possibility (Pakendorf & Schalley 2007) or temporal
sequence (Angelo & Schultze-Berndt 2016). 

The precautioning morphemes identified in Schmidtke-Bode’s (2009:130ff.)
typological study on purpose clauses do not belong to a particular syntactic
category – they may be e.g. conjunctions, adverbials, adpositions, or TAM
markers. Precautioning clauses tend to have their own specific argument
structure configurations: explicit subjects are significantly more frequent in
such clauses than in positive purpose clauses. This follows from the
precautioning clauses’ overwhelming preference for different subjects (36.9%
vs. 5.8% in positive purpose clauses). It probably reflects the fact that
undesirable consequences mostly originate in a third party, while welcome ones
are often self-triggered.

In addition to the semantic subtypes, internal syntactic structure, and
morphological marking of precautioning clauses, a major issue in the existing
literature has been the potential difficulty of distinguishing between their
dependent or independent syntactic status (e.g. Austin 1981:229; François
2003:304-310), due to the close pragmatic link to a pre-emptive clause. 

The workshop will bring together scholars primarily working on lesser-known
languages to study the crosslinguistic variation of precautioning clauses with
a focus on the topics mentioned above. Thanks to descriptions of the forms,
syntactic strategies and semantic profiles of such clauses in individual
languages, families or areas, the workshop will pave the way for a typology of
such constructions. 

A longer version of the workshop description and guidelines for abstract
submission are available on the conference website,
https://swl8.sciencesconf.org.




------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*****************    LINGUIST List Support    *****************
Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
            http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/
 


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-29-360	
----------------------------------------------------------
Visit LL's Multitree project for over 1000 trees dynamically generated
from scholarly hypotheses about language relationships:
          http://multitree.org/