[Corpora-List] Workshop on specificity, Trento (Italy), 12 February 2014

[Marco Baroni]

*Webpage*

http://clic.cimec.unitn.it/specificity/

*Important Dates*

Submission deadline: 15 December 2013
Notification of acceptance: 12 January 2014
Workshop: 12 February 2014

*Description*

While a number of formal notions of specificity have been proposed by 
semanticists and philosophers of language, many facets of the use and 
referential status of different indefinite noun phrases still remain 
unclear.
Researchers who worked on (non-)specificity have proposed to 
characterize this dimension of meaning either as a property of 
indefinite noun phrases and their modifiers (e.g. presence of 
'certain/specific', absence of overt determiners), or as a phenomenon 
that encompasses the whole sentence or even the discourse. In the first 
approach, understanding specificity requires formulating an explanatory 
description of the set of lexical, morphological and structural cues 
that signal (non-)specificity, in different languages. In the second, 
specificity also interacts with many well-studied phenomena in 
sentential semantics and discourse, such as sentential genericity, 
verbal aspect, operator scope, and topic/focus.
In addition, the topic of specificity has been explored by researchers 
from different traditions of language study. Scholars interested in the 
syntax/semantics interface have tried to capture it using the rich 
functional structure put forth by the Italian 'cartographic' tradition, 
insofar this encodes features of context and discourse (D-linking, 
topic/focus). A second perspective, mostly advocated by philosophers of 
language, resorts to a rich semantic encoding of crucial aspects of the 
context of utterance, at some linguistic level (LF?). Yet others have 
argued in favor of a purely pragmatic account. An important general 
question is thus whether some of these approaches can or should be 
integrated.
Beyond its intrinsic theoretical interest, a better understanding of the 
cues and features of (non-)specificity would have an impact on the 
possibility to carry out automatic mark-ups of different types of 
indefinites in large corpora, and would bear on studies of the 
acquisition of noun phrases by children which go beyond the 
definite/indefinite divide.

*Research questions*

This workshop aims to address the following questions:

Which types of specificity do actually exists, and to what extent the 
many notions advanced in the literature can be derived one from the other?

What are the observable morpho-syntactic phenomena related to the 
different notions of specificity in different languages, and what do 
they tell us about indefinites in general?

How does specificity interact with the notion of non-specificity, 
referentiality, definiteness, genericity?

Which cues for specificity might lead to computationally viable tools 
for marking it automatically?

What can acquisition studies tell us about the notion of specificity?

*Invited speakers*

Adriana Belletti (University of Siena)
http://www.ciscl.unisi.it/persone/belletti.htm

Valentina Bianchi (University of Siena)
http://www.ciscl.unisi.it/persone/bianchi.htm

Manuel Leonetti (Universidad de Alcalá)
http://www2.uah.es/leonetti

Yoad Winter (Utrecht University)
http://www.phil.uu.nl/~yoad/

*Call for Papers*

Authors are asked to submit their abstracts as PDF files via EasyAbs at 
the following address: http://linguistlist.org/easyabs/specificity

Submissions should be anonymous and not reveal the identity of the 
author(s) in any form (e.g., references, file name of the abstract).

Abstracts should not exceed two pages in length (including examples and 
references), in 12-point type, Times font, single line spacing, 
2.5cm/1inch margins.

Talks will be 30 minutes + 10 minutes for discussion.

*Scientific Committee*

Raffaella Bernardi
Valentina Bianchi
Michelangelo Falco
Manuel Leonetti
Denis Paperno
Yoad Winter
Roberto Zamparelli

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