29.4511, Calls: Disc Analysis, Gen Ling, Pragmatics, Syntax, Text/Corpus Ling/Germany

Wed Nov 14 20:28:00 UTC 2018

LINGUIST List: Vol-29-4511. Wed Nov 14 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.4511, Calls: Disc Analysis, Gen Ling, Pragmatics, Syntax, Text/Corpus Ling/Germany

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Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2018 15:27:15
From: Rita Finkbeiner [finkbeiner at phil.hhu.de]
Subject: Questions across Communicative Settings, Genres, and Discourse Domains

Full Title: Questions across Communicative Settings, Genres, and Discourse Domains 

Date: 21-Aug-2019 - 24-Aug-2019
Location: Leipzig, Germany 
Contact Person: Rita Finkbeiner
Meeting Email: finkbeiner at phil.hhu.de

Linguistic Field(s): Discourse Analysis; General Linguistics; Pragmatics; Syntax; Text/Corpus Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 15-Nov-2018 

Meeting Description:

(Session of 52nd Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea)

Workshop convenors: Rita Finkbeiner, Julian Stawecki and Robert Külpmann

One of the most fascinating aspects of questions in natural languages is their
power to structure discourse. Questions – and the various (interrogative)
sentence types that correspond to them – are entangled with their contexts of
use in a number of intriguing ways. They come in a wide variety of formal and
functional subtypes and are distributed among a wide variety of communicative
settings, genres, and discourse domains.

For example, there are specific types of questions for specific communicative
purposes (e.g., exam questions, police interview questions, research
questions). What is more, different (interrogative) sentence types (e.g.,
wh-interrogatives, yes/no-questions, declarative questions, echo questions,
tag questions) or interrogative markers (e.g., wh-elements, question-specific
modal particles) (e.g., Reis 1991) may be biased towards different genres
(e.g., interview, news report) or discourse domains (e.g., academic discourse,
medical discourse). For example, there is a specific kind of verb-final
wh-clause in German that is highly restricted to headlines or titles
(Finkbeiner 2018). Moreover, it may be expected that, e.g., how-questions are
very frequent in narrative, instructive and counselling contexts, whereas
why-questions are more frequent in explanative and argumentative contexts.

Examples of discourse domains which have been examined with respect to the use
of questions are courtroom interaction (Archer 2005), police interrogations
(Cerović 2016), everyday conversation (Weber 1993, Koshik 2005,
Stivers/Enfield/Levinson 2010, Tomaselli/Gatt 2015), and classroom interaction
(Tenenberg 1988, Ishino 2017). While certain discourse domains such as
journalism, academic discourse, medical or legal discourse seem to be highly
question-oriented, other contexts, e.g., information signs in public spaces,
seem to be rather question-resistant. These kinds of restrictions may be
functionally motivated, but may also correlate with syntactic and semantic
properties of questions. For example, question-specific modal particles such
as German denn may indicate specific (non-information seeking) question
interpretations (cf. Meibauer 1994, Bayer/Obenauer 2011) which, in turn, may
arise preferably in specific communicative settings.

While questions definitely are one of the hot topics in recent research on
syntax, semantics, and pragmatics (cf., e.g., Ginzburg/Sag 2000, de Ruiter
2012, Onea 2016, Dayal 2016, Frana 2017), surprisingly little is known about
the intricate relationship between kinds of interrogative sentences, kinds of
questioning speech acts, and kinds of communicative settings, genres, or
discourse domains in which questions are used. On the other hand, the last
decades have seen a growing interest in the notion of genre from a pragmatic
point of view (e.g., Bax 2011, Unger 2007, Aijmer/Lewis 2017), as well as in
corpus-linguistic and variationist approaches to genre and discourse domains
(e.g., Biber 1995, Biber/Conrad 2009). Against this backdrop, our workshop
aims at filling this gap, exploring – from different theoretical and empirical
perspectives – syntactic, pragmatic, communicative, genre- and
discourse-related aspects of (canonical and non-canonical) questions, their
different uses and functions, and the connection between interrogative
constructions, speech acts of questioning, and their preferred or dispreferred
contexts of use.

2nd Call for Papers:

We invite experts in syntax, pragmatics, discourse analysis, genre theory, the
syntax/pragmatics interface, speech act theory, corpus linguistics,
variational linguistics, and historical linguistics to share and advance
knowledge of the workings and impact of questions across communicative
settings, genres, and discourse domains.

Relevant research questions include, but are not limited to:

- How are the formal properties of questioning constructions correlated with
their pragmatic and discoursal functions?
- What are the pragmatic and discoursal functions of questions?
- In what kinds of communicative settings, genres, and discourse domains are
what kinds of questions preferred/dispreferred?
- With respect to which aspects do interrogative constructions and/or
questioning speech acts differ across institutions or discourse domains, and
where do they converge?
- How can the question-answer-relation be modelled for different genres or
discourse domains?
- Is there a correlation between types of questioning constructions, types of
questioning speech acts, and types of genres, or discourse domains?
- If yes, how can this correlation be captured within a theory of the
syntax/discourse interaction?

If you are interested in participating in this workshop, please send your
abstract (max. 300 words) to the workshop convenors: finkbeiner at phil.hhu.de no
later than 15 November 2018. Submission at this stage is non-anonymous.

Important Dates:

- Deadline for submission of abstracts to workshop convenors: 15 November 2018
- Notification of inclusion of abstract in the workshop proposal: 20 November
2018
- Notification of acceptance/rejection of the workshop proposal by the SLE
organizers: 15 December 2018
- If our workshop proposal is accepted, submission of full abstracts to SLE by
the participants: 15 January 2019

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