33.3149, Calls: Pragmatics, Semantics/Portugal

Sat Oct 15 22:16:46 UTC 2022

LINGUIST List: Vol-33-3149. Sat Oct 15 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.3149, Calls: Pragmatics, Semantics/Portugal

Moderators:

Editor for this issue: Everett Green <everett at linguistlist.org>
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Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2022 22:16:35
From: Marco Favaro [marco.favaro at edu.ulisboa.pt]
Subject: Modal particles in Romance languages

Full Title: Modal particles in Romance languages 

Date: 01-Jun-2023 - 02-Jun-2023
Location: Lisbon, Portugal 
Contact Person: Marco Favaro
Meeting Email: marco.favaro at edu.ulisboa.pt
Web Site: https://sites.google.com/view/modalparticlesinromance/home 

Linguistic Field(s): Pragmatics; Semantics 

Language Family(ies): Romance 

Call Deadline: 15-Jan-2023 

Meeting Description:

This two-days meeting brings together researchers on modal particles in
Romance languages with the aim of discussing and elucidating the presence and
the properties of modal particles in this language family.
We hope that this workshop will stimulate research on these elements, and it
will lead to greater clarity on the distribution of modal particles in Romance
languages, as well as on their formal and functional features.

Call for Papers:

Modal particles (MPs) are adverbial elements that operate in the
discourse-pragmatic domain. Their defining properties have been intensively
debated over the last forty years: research on modal particles has
investigated their formal and functional features, their categorization as a
coherent class of elements, their relationship with other discourse-pragmatic
elements and their cross-linguistic distribution (see Degand, Cornille &
Pietrandrea 2013 and Fedriani & Sansò 2017 for recent overviews on these
issues).

Modal particles are often assumed to be a language-specific class: their
presence is widely recognized in some languages (notably German, Dutch, Danish
and Swedish), but questioned for others. German represents by far the best
researched language in this sense: the very first studies on modal particles,
much of the subsequent research and – more in general – the major coordinates
of this research field have been mainly based on German data (see Weydt 1969,
1979; Abraham 1991; Meibauer 1994; Bayer & Struckmeier 2017 among many
others). The Romance situation looks quite different. Despite some
well-studied examples (see for instance Hansen 1998 on Fr. bien; Waltereit
2004, 2020 on Fr. quand même), modal particles have not been extensively
studied in Romance languages and – perhaps more importantly – no Romance
language seems to display a coherent paradigm of modal particles comparable to
what can be found in German. Nevertheless, adverbial elements that display
modal-particle-like functions can be found in most Romance languages
(Waltereit 2006; Coniglio 2008; Torrent 2011; Meisnitzer 2012; Squartini 2014;
Remberger 2021).

In this respect, the issue of what functions modal particles exactly express
is of particular interest: despite many proposals and diverging ideas (see the
overview in Waltereit 2001; see also Diewald 2013), we still lack a unifying
perspective on the functions expressed by these elements as well as a label
that brings them together in a single theoretical category (assuming this is
necessary). Therefore, the grammatical status of modal particles and their
functional range remain still rather elusive. This fact makes it even more
difficult to carry out comparative research and to identify convincing
examples of modal particles in languages where their presence is under
question.

Given this background, the present workshop aims at further stimulating the
research on modal particles in Romance languages, by discussing and
elucidating the presence and the properties of MPs in this language family. On
the one hand, we hope that the discussion will lead to greater clarity on the
distribution of modal particles in Romance languages, as well as on their
formal and functional features. On the other hand, by addressing the issue of
the functions expressed by MPs from a Romance perspective (that is, to some
extent, from a marginal perspective) we hope to spark discussion on what
categories can be effectively used for cross-linguistic research on MPs.

We invite contributions on modal particles in Romance languages, including
dialects and non-standard varieties: case studies on single elements, papers
that adopt a comparative approach and papers that address relevant theoretical
issues are all welcomed.

Abstract submission: 
- Please send your anonymous abstracts (max. 500 words, excluding references)
to marco.favaro at edu.ulisboa.pt by 15 January 2023. 
- Each abstract will be reviewed by two members of the Scientific committee.
Notifications of acceptance will be sent in early March 2023. 
- The talks will be 30 minutes long, followed by 15 minutes for discussion.
The workshop will be held in English.

(please see the conference website for the full call for papers and
references)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-33-3149	
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