31.3706, Calls: Hist Ling, Pragmatics, Semantics/Brazil

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-31-3706. Thu Dec 03 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 31.3706, Calls: Hist Ling, Pragmatics, Semantics/Brazil

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Date: Thu, 03 Dec 2020 17:48:04
From: Luciana Sanchez-Mendes [sanchez.mendes at gmail.com]
Subject: Workshop 4: Universals and Variation in Semantics and Pragmatics

 
Full Title: Workshop 4: Universals and Variation in Semantics and Pragmatics 

Date: 19-Jul-2021 - 25-Jul-2021
Location: Campinas, Brazil 
Contact Person: Luciana Sanchez-Mendes
Meeting Email: sanchez.mendes at gmail.com
Web Site: https://www2.iel.unicamp.br/v-cilh/english/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Pragmatics; Semantics 

Call Deadline: 21-Dec-2020 

Meeting Description:

Organizers: Ana Paula Quadros Gomes (UFRJ) / Luciana Sanchez Mendes (UFF)

This workshop aims to gather studies focusing on semantic and pragmatic
variation in natural languages.

Since Greenberg’s (1963) seminal work on typology of syntactic constructions,
a new agenda on the Linguistics of the 20th Century has emerged. That
rationalist approach aims to identify universal properties across languages. A
natural unfolding of this view was to look at how natural languages vary on
mapping semantic notions.

Lexical semantic change studies in historical linguistics traditionally focus
on how word meaning varies and changes over the course of time.

Studies on change and variation could go beyond the word level, including the
“semantic glue” as a target of scrutiny, by the comparison of
functional/grammatical morphemes meaning and the principles of semantic
composition in different languages. New semantic typologies have arisen.
Barwise and Cooper’s (1981) DP Universal, for example, lead to a discussion of
the existence of two distinct mechanisms in natural languages:
A-quantification and D-quantification (Bach et al. 1995). This topic was
explored on Brazilian Portuguese (Schmitt & Munn 1999; Müller 2002, a.o.);
indigenous languages (e.g. Vieira, 1995 on Asurini do Trocará; Müller et al
2006 on Karitiana) and Libras – Brazilian Sign Language – (Sá et al., 2012;
Almeida-Silva, 2013). There is a vast literature on the cross-linguistic
variation and possible universals in nominal phrases, (Chierchia 2010; Doetjes
2012, a.o.). The topic was discussed in Brazilian Portuguese (Paraguassu and
Müller 2007: de Oliveira and Rothstein 2011) and indigenous languages (Müller
et al 2006 on Karitiana; Lima, 2014 on Yudja; Sanchez-Mendes et al., 2020 on
Terena, a.o.). Von Fintel and Matthewson (2008) discuss the variation on the
verbal domain, finding it difficult to postulate universals beyond the
internal building blocks of event structures (such as Dowty’s 1979 DO
predicate). In Brazilian Portuguese, Basso (2007) discussed specificities of
BP accomplishments and Ilari and Basso (2004) showed distinguishing properties
of stative predicates. Adaptations on the canonical tests of Aktionsarten to
analyze the verbal were discussed for Karitiana (Sanchez-Mendes 2014) and
Libras (Simonassi 2019). Pragmatics is also subject to intra and
cross-linguistic variation. Intra-lingual variation phenomena may be divided
in micro-social (situational) and macro-social (intercultural)
variation.Labovian Sociolinguistic claims that the variation witnessed at all
levels of language reveals “structured heterogeneity.” Synchronic variation
mirrors diachronic change. Duarte (2020) focus on a semantic variant (such as
animacy and specificity features) as stimulating Brazilian Portuguese to
undergo a parametric change from a prodrop to a non-prodrop language. Although
in Labovian frameworks semantic features seriously influence syntactics, there
are very few sociolinguistic studies on semantic variation itself. Robson
(2012) alerts: “for the past 40 years of sociolinguistic research has focused
on exploring the meaning of variation (cf. Eckert, 2012), while leaving the
variation of meaning aside.” In this symposium, we wish semantics to gain the
protagonism it has been denied.


Call for Papers: 

We invite submissions on any of the above topics. We specially encourage
submissions on under-represented languages such as indigenous and sign
languages. 

Information about abstract submission and registration can be found on the
website of the main conference: https://www.even3.com.br/vcilh2021/




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