35.1041, Calls: Placeholders in East and West

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-35-1041. Mon Mar 25 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.1041, Calls: Placeholders in East and West

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Date: 22-Mar-2024
From: Inga Hennecke [inga.hennecke at uni-tuebingen.de]
Subject: Placeholders in East and West


Full Title: Placeholders in East and West

Date: 09-Oct-2024 - 11-Oct-2024
Location: Tübingen, Germany
Contact Person: Wiltrud Mihatsch
Meeting Email: w.mihatsch at uni-tuebingen.de

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics

Call Deadline: 31-Mar-2024

Meeting Description:

Conference: Placeholders in East and West
Organizers: Wiltrud Mihatsch and Inga Hennecke (University of
Tübingen) (Funded by the DFG)
Date: October 9th – 11th  2024
Venue: University of Tübingen (Germany)

2nd Call for Papers:

Placeholders such as eng. thingy or whatchamacallit or French truc,
machin, bidule, chose (often, but not only, nouns) do not differ from
lexemes in their syntactic distribution. However, unlike lexemes, they
do not contribute to the proposition through their semantic content.
They rather function as placeholders for lexemes, during word-finding
problems in the formulation process, to fill lexical gaps, but also in
the context of taboos and deliberate avoidance of lexical
specification in contexts where variables are needed, e.g. in
generalizing statements or text templates. They are mostly spoken
language phenomena, however, notably their use as a variable seems
rather linked to formal written language. Their range of communicative
functions is reminiscent of pragmatic markers, while the substitution
of lexemes is reminiscent of pronouns.
In the past, special features of placeholders have repeatedly been
described in rather isolated small-scale publications, have been
stigmatized in prescriptive contexts and are generally not the main
research focus of linguists up to this day, although the volume by
Amiridze/Davis/Maclagan (2010) has managed to bring together different
strands of research on placeholders from a cross-linguistic
perspective for the first time. In recent years, a number of new
publications on placeholders have appeared, particularly in Asia and
Europe, which tackle fine-grained syntactic, pragmatic and prosodic
analyses. In 2022 Françoise Rose and Brigitte Pakendorf organized a
workshop on “Fillers and Placeholders” at the ALT conference in
Austin. We believe that it is important to pursue this line of
research, while concentrating on placeholders, and to bring together
researchers who are currently investigating placeholders worldwide in
order to discuss questions that remain unanswered. Our aim is not only
to clarify the status of placeholders, but also to shed new light on
the fundamental problem of categorizing lexis, grammar, and pragmatic
markers by looking at borderline cases and transitions.
The conference will provide a platform for researchers with a
dedicated interest in the topic and we hope the conference will help
us to gain new insights into this peculiar category of linguistic
expressions from a comparative linguistic perspective and different
theoretical and methodological frameworks. So far, talks on
placeholders in English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese,
Georgian, Hebrew, North Siberian languages, Japanese and Chinese are
planned. Further talks or posters on any language of the world
(including Creole languages) are welcome.
The talks or posters should address one or several of the following
aspects and phenomena:

(a) Formal morphosyntactic or phonological properties of placeholders
distinguishing them from lexemes and pronouns
b) Semantic properties of placeholders
c) Discourse functions of placeholders
d) The diachronic evolution of placeholders
e) Crosslinguistic, typological or comparative aspects of placeholders
f) Their relations with neighboring and/or overlapping phenomena such
as pronouns, shell nouns, filler or hesitation markers and uses of
general nouns beyond lexical substitution.

We are looking forward to receiving abstracts in English of a maximum
of 700 words (including references) and would like to ask you to
specify whether you would like to present a talk (30 minutes incl.
discussion) or a poster. The congress fee, which covers the coffee
breaks, is 30 €.
Please send your abstracts until March 31 2024 to Wiltrud Mihatsch
(w.mihatsch at uni-tuebingen.de)
Notification of acceptance will take place until May 15 2024.



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LINGUIST List: Vol-35-1041
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