Call for Papers: The Meaning of P (with a special session on spatial polysemy)

[Jan Strunk]

Call for Papers


The Meaning of P
(with a special session on spatial polysemy)


A conference organized by the Department of Linguistics
(Sprachwissenschaftliches Institut) of Ruhr-Universität Bochum.

Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, Germany, November 21-23, 2012


There is general agreement among linguists that prepositions are highly
ambiguous. There is much less agreement about the origin of
the ambiguity (homonymy, polysemy); but even more surprisingly,
only few attempts have been undertaken to characterize the spectrum
of possible meanings of large sets of prepositions in individual
languages, let alone cross-linguistically. Recent research has shown
that analyses of preposition senses not only have to account
for their ambiguity, but also for the near-synonymy of prepositions.

Meanings of prepositions have mostly been investigated by
lexicographers, but quite often without the provision of clear criteria
for determining individual meanings. Consequently, recent research may
show that senses attributed to particular prepositions can actually be
derived compositionally from the syntactic context of the preposition,
which raises the question concerning the proper sense of
the preposition in such contexts.

Our conference aims at a comprehensive picture of preposition meanings.
Thus, we invite work addressing all questions touching on
the interpretation of prepositions, including the following issues:

- Typological, theoretical, and computational approaches to
  a comprehensive analysis of preposition meanings.

- Annotation schemata for preposition senses.

- In-depth compositional analyses of prepositions in all kinds of
  syntactic and semantic frameworks.

- Attempts to define basic semantic or ontological relations onto which
  preposition meanings can be mapped.


Special session on spatial polysemy
Recent research on preposition meanings has produced a large corpus
of work on spatial polysemy. We therefore devote part of the conference
to a special workshop on spatial polysemy, which will not only deal
with spatial interpretations of prepositions, but with the general role
of spatiality in interpretations.


Invited speakers:
Claudia Maienborn (Universität Tübingen, D)
James Pustejovsky (Brandeis University, USA)
Joost Zwarts (Universiteit Utrecht, NL)
N.N.


Conference website:
http://www.linguistics.rub.de/TheMeaningofP2012/


Paper submission:
Please submit an electronic abstract (PDF, 5 pages including figures and
references) to Anneli von Könemann (vonkoenemann at linguistics.rub.de),
indicating whether the paper is submitted to the main conference or
to the special session on spatial polysemy.

Deadline for submissions: May 31, 2012

Notification of acceptance: June 30, 2012


Please direct your inquiries to
Antje Müller (mueller at linguistics.rub.de),
Tibor Kiss (tibor at linguistics.rub.de),
or Anneli von Könemann (vonkoenemann at linguistics.rub.de).