34.533, Calls: General Linguistics, Anthropological Linguistics/Brazil

Sat Feb 11 01:27:49 UTC 2023

LINGUIST List: Vol-34-533. Sat Feb 11 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.533, Calls: General Linguistics, Anthropological Linguistics/Brazil

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Date: Sat, 11 Feb 2023 01:24:49
From: Johannes Helmbrecht [johannes.helmbrecht at ur.de]
Subject: Determination and the Expression of Definiteness in Indigenous Languages of the Americas

Full Title: Determination and the Expression of Definiteness in Indigenous Languages of the Americas 

Date: 17-Jul-2023 - 21-Jul-2023
Location: Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil 
Contact Person: Johannes Helmbrecht
Meeting Email: johannes.helmbrecht at ur.de
Web Site: https://ica2021.unicentro.br/en/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics; General Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 31-Mar-2023 

Meeting Description:

Workshop on the 57th Congress of Americanists

Call for Papers:

Determination is a special kind of modification of the noun phrase that
specifies the mode of reference and converts a nominal into a noun phrase.
Functionally, determiners relate the entity designated by the nominal to the
universe of discourse by specifying the relation of the intended referent to
the set of potential referents semantically designated by the nominal, and by
marking its information status (cf. Moravcsik 1969, Leiss & Abraham (eds.)
2007, Lehmann n.d., and many others). Thus, determination is, on the one hand,
closely bound to the formal structure of the noun phrase, and on the other
hand, to the discourse-referential properties of the noun phrase. Typical
determiners are definite and indefinite articles, demonstratives, etc. 

Definiteness, on the other hand, is not a language-specific grammatical
category, as is often presupposed in descriptive grammars and even in studies
of general linguistics. It is rather a universal functional domain comprising
various semantic and pragmatic notions (cf. Chafe 1976, Hawkins 1978, Lyons
1999, Abbott, 2004, Lehmann 2015, König 2018), which in turn could be
considered as comparative concepts in the sense of Haspelmath (2010) for
language comparison (cf. Croft 2016). The semantic and pragmatic concepts of
definiteness are familiarity and identifiability of the referent since the
intended referent is present in the universe of discourse of the
interlocutors. Further concepts that belong to this functional domain and that
are discussed in the literature are uniqueness, salience, existence, and
inclusiveness (cf. Lyons 1999; König 2018).

Determination and definiteness have been studied extensively for European
languages, but much less so for indigenous languages of North and South
America. It is the goal of this workshop to fill this gap. All contributions
that give answers to one or more of the following more specific questions are
welcome for this workshop: 

What are the semantic and pragmatic factors for the selection of specific
determiners in the language? What do the chosen determiners encode? What is
the information status of the referents of the NPs with different determiners?
More specifically:
- Are there definite articles? indefinite articles? and how many? in the
language
- What are the formal-structural properties of these articles?
- What kind of semantic feature other than specific, non-specific, generic do
they distinguish (e.g., animacy, spatial orientation, shape of the referent,
and others)?
- In which semantic and pragmatic contexts are they used (obligatorily,
optionally)? 
- What informational status of the referent do they signal? and what are the
semantic and pragmatic contexts?
- Are there other kinds of determiners in the language and what are their
formal and semantic/ pragmatic properties, classifiers, quantifiers, bare
nouns, and others?
- Beyond determiners, how are definiteness or aspects of definiteness
expressed by other means in the sample languages? 

References:
Chafe, Wallace L. 1976. Givenness, Contrastiveness, Definiteness, Subjects,
Topics, and Point of View. In Charles N. Li (ed.), Subject and Topic, 25-55.
New York: Academic Press.
Hawkins, John A. 1978. Definiteness and indefiniteness. London: Croom Helm.
König, Ekkehard. 2018. Definite articles and their uses. In Daniël Olmen,
Tanja Mortelmans, Frank Brisard (Eds.), Aspects of Linguistic Variation (pp.
165–184). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110607963-006
Lehmann n.d. Linguistic Documentation (LiDo): entry ''determination''
http://linguistik.uni-regensburg.de:8080/lido/Lido (Accessed 02/12/2019)).
Leiss, Elisabeth, Abraham, Werner (eds.) 2007. Nominal determination:
typology, context constraints, and historical emergence. Amsterdam [u.a.]:
Benjamins
Lyons, Christopher. 1999. Definiteness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Moravcsik, Edith A. 1969. ''Determination''. Working Papers on Language
Universals (Stanford) 1:64-98.

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