29.4131, Calls: Disc Analysis, Gen Ling, Pragmatics, Syntax, Text/Corpus Ling/Germany

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LINGUIST List: Vol-29-4131. Tue Oct 23 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.4131, Calls: Disc Analysis, Gen Ling, Pragmatics, Syntax, Text/Corpus Ling/Germany

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Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2018 18:37:54
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 the 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 is their power to structure
discourse. Question/answer pairs can be said to represent the basic units of
dialogic interaction. But also beyond dialogue, questions – and the various
sentence types that correspond to them – are entangled with their contexts of
use in a number of intriguing ways. Questions come in a wide variety of formal
and functional subtypes and are distributed among a wide variety of
communicative settings, genres, and discourse domains.

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 (wh-interrogatives,
yes/no-questions, declarative questions, echo questions, tag questions) or
interrogative markers (wh-elements, question-specific modal particles) (cf.
Reis 1991, Meibauer 1994, Bayer/Obenauer 2011) 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
(Finkbeiner 2018). As to the distribution of wh-elements, it can be expected
that how-questions are more 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 (Koshik 2005, Stivers/Enfield/Levinson
2010, Tomaselli/Gatt 2015), and classroom interaction (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.

While questions definitely are one of the hot topics in recent research on
syntax, semantics, and pragmatics (e.g., Ginzburg/Sag 2000, de Ruiter 2012,
Dayal 2016, Heusinger et al., to appear), surprisingly little is known about
the intricate relationship between interrogative sentences, questions, and
communicative settings, genres, or discourse domains in which they 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., Unger 2007, Bax 2011,
Aijmer/Lewis 2017), as well as in corpus-linguistic and variationist
approaches to genre and discourse domains (e.g., Biber/Conrad 2009). Against
this backdrop, our workshop aims at filling this gap, exploring – from
different theoretical and empirical perspectives – 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.


Call for Papers:

We invite experts in syntax, pragmatics, discourse analysis, genre theory, the
syntax/pragmatics interface, text and 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:

- In what kinds of communicative settings, genres, and discourse domains are
what kinds of questions (preferably) used?
- In what kinds of communicative settings, genres, and discourse domains are
what kinds of questions dispreferred?
- How may these preferences/dispreferences change over time?
- With respect do which aspects do interrogative constructions and/or
questioning speech acts differ across genres, institutions, or discourse
domains, and where do they converge?
- What are the pragmatic and discoursal functions of questions?
- How are the formal properties of questioning constructions correlated with
their pragmatic and discoursal functions?
- 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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