Call for papers: Discourse-coherence mechanisms and pronominal anaphora in language acquisition

[Natalia Gagarina]

CALL FOR PAPERS

WORKSHOP "Discourse-coherence mechanisms and pronominal anaphora in 
language acquisition" during the

ANNUAL MEETING of the German Linguistic Society (Deutsche Gesellschaft 
für Sprachwissenschaft DGfS) in Göttingen

FEBRUARY 23-25, 2011

Many of the preferences and heuristics that guide the use of pronominal 
expressions have been based on the linguistic properties of antecedents 
such as grammatical and thematic roles they fill in the sentence. 
Alternatively, pronominal forms and the strategies for their  
interpretation as discourse anaphora may be explained as contingent on 
the general  coherence strategy of a discourse segment. In other words, 
the mental model of the situation and the morpho-syntactic means for its 
establishment influence the anaphora resolution preferences.   A 
situation description involving a telic predicate biases the general 
discourse expectation towards the goal/result of the action and promotes 
co-reference establishment to non-subject referents. Parallelism between 
depicted event structures endorses as a general coherence mechanism an 
analogous co-reference establishment strategy - pronominal forms are 
resolved to antecedents occupying the same grammatical roles. The 
acquisition of anaphora resolution strategies requires that children 
consider various properties of discourse structure and mayor mechanisms 
of coherence establishment such as resemblance, contiguity in time and 
space and causality. In this workshop we want to explore questions 
concerning  the influence of the situation model in terms of temporal 
and causal characteristics of the depicted events on the use of 
pronominal anaphora.  

Questions to be addressed in the workshop include:
1. Do children consider the structure and the temporal specifications of 
depicted events as cues for anaphora resolution in the same way as adult 
native speakers (transitivity, aspectual and temporal markers of verbal 
predicates)?
2. Do children exploit the parallelism of linguistic structures for 
reference assignment between anaphora and antecedents occupying parallel 
grammatical and thematic roles?
3. In which respects are the effects of the coherence establishing 
mechanism similar or different in the production and comprehension of 
pronominal anaphora?

ORGANIZERS:
Natalia Gagarina, Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS) Berlin
Milena Kuehnast, Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS) Berlin

SUBMISSION of abstracts:
Anonymous abstracts no longer than *300 words* should be sent to Milena 
Kuehnast (kuehnast at zas.gwz-berlin.de) and Natalia Gagarina 
(gagarina at zas.gwz-berlin.de) with the mail subject “DGfS 2011 Abstract”

The abstract should be in plain text or in PDF format; in English only. 
Please include the following information in the body of the email: 
author's name(s), affiliation, email address, title of the abstract.

The normal time alotted for presentation is 20 minutes plus 10 minutes 
for discussion.

Important DATES:
DEADLINE for abstract submission: 23 August 2010
NOTIFICATION of acceptance and more information: 13 September 2010
Provisional PROGRAM: 15 December 2010
DGfS CONFERENCE: 23-25 February 2011, Göttingen, Germany




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