29.4437, Calls: Gen Ling, Lang Doc, Lexicography, Semantics, Typology/Italy

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Mon Nov 12 17:48:47 UTC 2018


LINGUIST List: Vol-29-4437. Mon Nov 12 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.4437, Calls: Gen Ling, Lang Doc, Lexicography, Semantics, Typology/Italy

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Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2018 12:47:55
From: Thera Crane [thera.crane at helsinki.fi]
Subject: A Cross-linguistic Perspective on the Role of the Lexicon in Aspecuality

 
Full Title: A Cross-linguistic Perspective on the Role of the Lexicon in Aspecuality 

Date: 04-Sep-2019 - 06-Sep-2019
Location: Pavia, Italy 
Contact Person: Thera Crane
Meeting Email: thera.crane at helsinki.fi

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Language Documentation; Lexicography; Semantics; Typology 

Call Deadline: 12-Nov-2018 

Meeting Description:

Actionality (also known as lexical aspect, verb aspect, situation type,
aktionsart, aspect2, and other terms) arises through the interaction of a
lexical verb's meaning and aspectual potential and its possible argument
configurations and their bounding potential (Sasse 2002). We understand
actionality as the configuration of constituent phases and boundaries that
make up a state of affairs (Binnick 1991). The contribution of lexical items
to aspectual interpretations is a primary component in understanding how
states-of-affairs are conceptualized in human language. Various theoretical
accounts lay out a set of actional classes together with a set of verbal
lexicosemantic properties that determine them (e.g. Vendler 1957, Breu 1994,
Smith 1997, Bickel 1997, Van Valin & LaPolla 1997, Tatevosov 2002, Croft 2012,
Tatevosov 2016, Van Valin 2018).

The modal number of such classes is five or six (sometimes with  subtypes);
Tatevosov has more. Subsequent work, however, has continued to reveal actional
classes that they do not cover, and the widely held assumption that some basic
set of such classes is universal can be questioned (see e.g. Bar-el 2015 and
references therein).

No such system has been used in a large cross-linguistic survey, probably for
the practical reason that they require extensive elicitation and/or
high-quality grammatical and lexical resources. Tests like those used since
Vendler 1957 and Dowty 1979 to identify actionality classes are
language-specific and not easily generalizable, i.e. we have no
cross-linguistic standard tests. Despite the known centrality of verb lexical
meaning to actional and aspectual classes, there appears to have been no
wordlist-based comparative work. As a result we know almost nothing of the
distributional typology of actionality systems.

There are studies identifying actionality phenomena that might profitably be
pursued cross-linguistically. Bar-el 2015 notes that some languages conflate
what are generally considered robust or universal distinctions. Various
descriptive grammars have posited language-specific classes that are ripe for
cross-linguistic testing. Current work on the Bantu language family suggests
complex lexicalization patterns in which a single lexeme encodes a
coming-to-be phase (e.g. becoming angry), the ensuing state change, and the
resultant state (being angry) (Botne & Kershner 2000, Kershner 2002, among
many others; for an overview see Crane & Persohn, in prep.). Another
remarkable phenomenon, reported mostly for languages of Asia and the Americas,
is non-culminative readings of Vendlerian accomplishments (as in ‘S/he read
the book but did not finish it'); see Martin et al. 2016 for an overview.
Theoretical work generally treats states as basic and state changes as derived
(e.g. Van Valin 2006 for predicate semantics; Koontz-Garboden 2012 for
derivation), but Nichols 2015 and ongoing work suggests that many languages
treat change of state as basic.

(Please contact us for a list of references.)


Call for Papers:

The goals of the theme session are as follows:

- to bring together empirical evidence on actional categories and actional
typology from a broad spectrum of languages
- to shed light on unexpected readings or construals, such as the 
non-culmination of accomplishments, and on the semantic factors that favour
these
- to work towards developing best documentary practices for descriptive
accuracy and typological comparison – if, in fact, actional categories can be
made comparable across languages
- to raise hypotheses on the distributional typology of actionality
- to ask whether, if not a universal system, a robustly widespread core set of
actionality categories can be identified

Submission Guidelines:

Please indicate your interest in participating, together with a preliminary
title, to all organizers (see below). If the theme session proposal is
accepted by the ALT Program Committee, your abstract will have to be submitted
in early 2019 (we will send reminders and guidelines).

Deadline for statements of interest: November 12, 2018  (Monday)

Contact: persohn.linguistics at gmail.com, thera.crane at helsinki.fi,
johanna at berkeley.edu    (please send your E-mail to all three addresses)

We will consider publication of the papers as a special journal issue or an
edited volume.




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