31.3403, Calls: Cog Sci, Psycholing, Semantics, Syntax/Greece

Fri Nov 6 02:15:48 UTC 2020

LINGUIST List: Vol-31-3403. Thu Nov 05 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 31.3403, Calls: Cog Sci, Psycholing, Semantics, Syntax/Greece

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Date: Thu, 05 Nov 2020 21:15:00
From: Marta Donazzan [marta.donazzan at univ-nantes.fr]
Subject: Causation: from Concept(s) to Grammar

Full Title: Causation: from Concept(s) to Grammar 

Date: 31-Aug-2021 - 03-Sep-2021
Location: Athens, Greece 
Contact Person: Clémentine Raffy
Meeting Email: craffy at uni-koeln.de

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Psycholinguistics; Semantics; Syntax 

Call Deadline: 15-Nov-2020 

Meeting Description:

Convenors: Marta Donazzan (LLING/Université de Nantes), Clémentine Raffy and
Klaus von Heusinger (University of Cologne)

Keynote speakers:  Artemis Alexiadou (Humbold Universität), Bridget Copley
(SFL/Université Paris 8)

A growing body of work on causation in natural language, following both formal
and cognitive approaches to grammar, has been recently showing that causation
cannot be reduced to a unique type of relation, and thus cannot be adequately
represented with a single, abstract CAUSE operator (as in e.g. Dowty 1979).

Among the formal models focusing on these different types of dependencies and
relations, force dynamic theories (Talmy 2000, Wolff & Thorstad 2016) have
decomposed causation into a set of primitives that reflect the interactions of
causers’ forces and tendencies. For instance, the English causative verb make
has been described as encoding a relation in which the Causer’s and Causee’s
tendencies have diverging directions (Wolff & Song 2003), and the predicate
let a relation where the Causer’s and Causee’s tendencies correspond.
While we have made progress in understanding the fine-grained structure of
causation at the conceptual level, its lexical and grammatical realisations
need further investigation. Cross-linguistically and within languages,
causative predicates appear to yield interpretations that are not entirely
covered by the primitive relations theorised by force dynamics. 

At the morphosyntactic level of representation, we are thus interested in
understanding how the selectional information of the causative verb is
determined and how this affects in turn the way  participants and result are
represented in syntax. One debated issue is, for instance, the division of
labour between the root and the functional head v (see, a.o., Alexiadou et al.
2006, Copley & Harley, 2020; Beavers & Koontz-Garboden 2020). In a model where
syntax and semantics inform each other, one may ask to what extent the
selectional properties of the causative v and the type of its complement
depend on the causal relation it encodes and how much of this information is
seen by grammar.

The purpose of this workshop is to bring together semanticists, syntacticians
and psycho-linguists interested in causation to to discuss the links between
the cognitive structure of causation and its linguistic realisations and the
way in which the causal primitives interact with grammar at each level of
representation.

Second Call for Papers: 

The deadline for submitting abstract is extended until 15 November 2020.

We encourage submissions of proposals addressing the main research questions
and other related issues, as for example:
1. Is causation in language best represented as a relation between events or
do we need other objects in the ontology ( e. g. dispositions or powers
(Mumford & Anjum 2011) or forces (Copley & Harley 2015))?
2. What are the morphosyntactic realisations of conceptual structures? Are
there recurring patterns?
3. When morphosynctacic realisations are different, in what way do their forms
inform the interpretation?
4. What are the selectional properties and/or restrictions of the causative
verb?
5. What is the role of functional heads (e.g. Voice) for the selection of
arguments? What type of information do they receive from other levels of
representation?

We invite submissions of preliminary abstracts of 300 words maximum (for
20-minute presentations with 10 minutes for discussion) that address any of
the topics in the meeting description or related questions.

Abstracts in PDF format should be sent to the following address:
CausationSLE2020 at gmail.com

If the workshop proposal is accepted, all preliminary workshop participants
will be invited to submit the full versions of their abstracts to the general
call for papers. Final abstracts of max 500 words (excluding references)
should be resubmitted to the SLE organizing committee before 15 January 2021.

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