29.3436, Calls: Romance; General Linguistics/Germany

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Fri Sep 7 05:55:59 UTC 2018


LINGUIST List: Vol-29-3436. Fri Sep 07 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.3436, Calls: Romance; General Linguistics/Germany

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Date: Fri, 07 Sep 2018 01:55:06
From: Malte Rosemeyer [malte.rosemeyer at romanistik.uni-freiburg.de]
Subject: Indefinites in Romance

 
Full Title: Indefinites in Romance 
Short Title: IndefinitesRomance 

Date: 29-Sep-2019 - 01-Oct-2019
Location: Kassel, Germany 
Contact Person: Malte Rosemeyer
Meeting Email: malte.rosemeyer at romanistik-uni-freiburg.de

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics 

Language Family(ies): Romance 

Call Deadline: 02-Jan-2019 

Meeting Description:

Indefinites, i.e. elements that refer to individuals, events, etc. without
specifying these individuals or events, can be described as a class of very
different syntactic categories, such as:

- Indefinite articles (Fr. une ‘some‘)
- Indefinite quantifiers (Sp. algún  ‘somebody‘, nadie ‘nobody‘)
- Indefinite adverbs (It.  qualche volta ‘sometimes‘)
- Indefinite verbal phrases (Pt. eu gosto de beber agua ‘I like to drink
water‘)

The syntax and semantics of Indefinites are usually described on the basis of
Haspelmath’s (1997) Implicational Hierarchies (see Haspelmath 1997, Aloni &
Port 2010 for an updated version). Recent studies however have extended the
standard description of indefinites by including further features such as
plurality, scalarity and speaker’s modality, among other properties (see
Chierchia 2006, Alonso-Ovalle & Menéndez-Benito 2017, Kellert submitted, Camus
Bergareche & Pérez-Saldanya 2011). 

In our workshop, we would like to address the question which morphosyntactic,
semantic and/or pragmatic factors, and historical processes are relevant to
the classification of indefinites. How important are modality, tense, aspect
and lexical verb classes (e.g., predicative and agentive verbs) for the
classification of indefinites as [-/+ specific], [+/- epistemic], [+/- free
choice]?. How did indefinites evolve? How stable is their category?

The aim of the workshop is thus to describe the distribution and categorical
properties in Romance from a diachronic, synchronic and comparative
perspective:

- Which parameters are relevant to descriptions of the distribution of Romance
indefinites?
- Are their semantic properties lexically encoded or do they result from being
used in a specific syntactic and/or pragmatic context (for instance tense and
modality)?  
- Can we identify historical pathways of evolution of indefinites across the
Romance languages?
- Are there other constructional classes that share similarities with
indefinites?

Please note that talks and discussions will take place in a Romance language
or German.


Call for Papers:

For this session, we welcome contributions of all frameworks. Abstracts should
be in a Romance language or German, include a description of the data and
method, and refer to the research questions of this call.

Please submit abstracts (max. 2 pages) via email to the session co-organizers
by 2 January 2019.

If you have any questions on this session, you are welcome to get in touch
with one of the co-organizers.




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