32.3350, Calls: General Linguistics, Pragmatics, Semantics, Typology/Romania

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-32-3350. Mon Oct 25 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.3350, Calls: General Linguistics, Pragmatics, Semantics, Typology/Romania

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Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2021 12:58:42
From: Anna Koche [anna.kocher at univie.ac.at]
Subject: How to Mark the Truth: A Cross-linguistic Approach to Verum

 
Full Title: How to Mark the Truth: A Cross-linguistic Approach to Verum 

Date: 24-Aug-2022 - 27-Aug-2022
Location: Bucharest, Romania 
Contact Person: Anna Kocher
Meeting Email: anna.kocher at univie.ac.at

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Pragmatics; Semantics; Typology 

Subject Language(s): English (eng)

Call Deadline: 01-Nov-2021 

Meeting Description:

This workshop focuses on the theoretical and empirical underpinnings of
truth-marking. The names that have been used to refer to the the phenomena
related to the issue include, among others, ‘counter-assertive focus’ (Watters
1979), ‘polar(ity) focus’ (Dik and Van der Hulst 1981), ‘verum focus’ (Höhle
1992), ‘emphatic polarity’ (Villa García and González Rodríguez 2021) or
simply ‘verum’ (Gutzmann and Castroviejo Miró 2011), which we adopt in this
call. This terminological variety is suggestive of the vast amount of ideas
and conceptions characteristic for this field of research. This workshop wants
to uncover the core of the issue and find out what verum truly constitutes. We
want to expand the empirical base and determine the common and diverging
properties of truth-marking in the languages of the world. The workshop’s
objective is to set a theoretical and empirical baseline for future research
on verum and related phenomena.

As a starting point we use the definition proposed by Höhle (1992) who
describes verum as emphasizing the expression of truth of a proposition. To
identify verum we rely on the lists of contexts in which it is allowed and
disallowed presented by  Matthewson & Gougie (2018), building on Zimmermann &
Hole (2008).

Allowed contexts
Correcting a previous utterance, corrections of negative expectations,
emphatic agreement, confirmation of expected path of events, answers to
questions (with emphatic effect), answers to indirect questions, in the
antecedent of conditionals (‘stressing the conditionality’), inside yes-​no
questions (with an ‘Is it really?’ effect)

Disallowed contexts
Discourse-​initially, neutral answers to questions

One aim of this workshop is to test how universally these lists apply and what
conclusion we can draw for our understanding of verum and for its theoretical
modeling. Furthermore, we aim to get a more complete overview of the
strategies different languages use to express verum.  Non-European languages
for which the expression of verum has been described, in greater or lesser
detail, include Vietnamese (Austroasiatic; Tran 2016), Aghem (Niger-Congo;
Watters 1979),  Gur languages (Niger-Congo; Schwarz 2010), Bambara
(Niger-Congo; Prokhorov 2014), Wolof (Niger-Congo; Jordanoska 2020), Bura
(Afro-Asiatic; Gutzmann et al. 2020), Upper Napo Kichwa (Quechuan; Grzech
2020), Gitksan (Tsimshianic; Matthewson 2021) and Kwak’wala (Wakashan; Littell
2016). These languages employ different strategies. Moreover, even within one
language, there doesn’t seem to always be a single linguistic element
dedicated to verum marking. Jordanoska (2020) showed that in Wolof there are
four different particles that can occur in verum contexts: de, kat, kay and
gaa. Their distribution is based on the polarity of the antecedent.
Furthermore, they can only occur in declarative clauses. Due to these
distributional facts, Jordanoska (2020) analyzed these particles as hybrids
between verum markers and response particles, meaning that Wolof does not have
a single lexical exponent of the verum operator. 

There is a vast amount of theoretical work on veurm. Gutzmann (2012)
systematized these approaches to truth-marking by distinguishing Lexical
Operator Theses (LOT) from Focal Accent Theses (FAT). FATs (such as Höhle
1992) posit that every sentence has a verum operator that is subject to the
focal marking rules of the language in question. In a verum context the verum
operator gets focused. LOTs (such as Romero and Han 2004, Gutzmann et al.
2020) posit that verum is a lexical operator independent of focus and is only
present in a sentence when it is overtly realized. A lot of theoretical work
on verum has been informed by Germanic data, where verum is expressed through
stress on a finite verb. This empirical fact has been used to suggest a link
between sentence mood and verum (cf. for instance Höhle 1992, Lohnstein 2016).


2nd Call for Papers:

This is a second call for paper for the workshop proposal on verum to take
place at the SLE 2022.

There is substantial variation cross-linguistically in how verum is marked and
which contexts fall under this marking. Furthermore, how to tackle this
variation within a theoretical model, is still up for debate. All these open
issues motivate this workshop that is set out to address what verum
constitutes, what strategies are used to express it and how verum relates to
sentence mood, focus, epistemic and evidential modality and other types of
meaning. Finally, we are also interested in the development of empirical
methods that help identify verum meaning in larger data sets or test
hypotheses with respect to verum meaning in experimental settings.

Submissions to the workshop may include, but need not be limited to:

- Descriptions of the verum marking inventory in lesser studied languages
- Cross-linguistic comparison of verum marking
- Systematic empirical studies (for instance corpus or experiments) on verum
and related categories
- Theoretical contributions on what constitutes verum, comparative to related
phenomena such as empathic agreement, counter-assertion, pragmatic
intensification (such as with really) or outer-negation questions
- Contributions dwelling into the interaction between verum, sentence mood,
focus marking, epistemic modality or others

Please send your anonymous abstract of max. 300 words to
anna.kocherunivie.ac.at by 01 November, 2021. The workshop organizers will
carry out a first round of internal review and notify authors of their
decision by mid-November. Accepted abstracts will be sent to the SLE
conference organizers as part of the workshop proposal. Notification of
acceptance or rejection of the workshop proposal will be by 15 December, 2021.

Workshop organizers: Izabela Jordanoska (LLACAN/CNRS, i.jordanoskagmail.com)
and Anna Kocher (Universität Wien, anna.kocherunivie.ac.at)




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