Cfei: Indefinites/SLE 44

[Volker Gast]

Workshop proposal: 'Indefinites in diachronic and comparative perspective'
Host conference: 44th Meeting of the SLE
Venue: Logroño, Spain
Date: Sept 8-11, 2011
Convenors: Johan van der Auwera, Volker Gast

Call for expression of interest

In order to prepare for the organization of a workshop at the 44th 
Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (http://sle2011.cilap.es), 
Sept 8 to 11, 2011 in Logroño, Volker Gast (Jena) and Johan van der 
Auwera (Antwerp) are inviting linguists to express their interest in the 
form of a preliminary title and a short abstract (~ 5 lines). The 
deadline is Saturday, November 12. If the proposal (to be sent on 
November 14) is accepted, there will be a another deadline (January 15, 
2011) for the submission of full abstracts. Please send your statement 
of interest to volker.gast at uni-jena.de.

Workshop description

The category of indefinite pronouns comprises a broad range of 
expressions such as existential, universal and negative pronominal 
quantifiers ('someone', 'everyone', 'no one'), free choice elements 
('whoever') and generic or impersonal pronouns ('one' as in 'one should 
not do this'), to name just the most prominent English representatives 
of this class. It constitutes a notoriously difficult topic of 
linguistic investigation for several reasons. Most importantly perhaps, 
the interpretation of indefinite pronouns is often heavily context 
dependent, and it is not clear how much meaning should be assigned to 
the pronouns themselves, and how much should be attributed to the 
context. For instance, existential pronouns such as 'someone' are often 
interpreted as universal quantifiers (e.g. in conditionals), negative 
polarity items turn into free choice elements (i.e. they assume a 
universal reading) under specific circumstances, and negative pronouns 
may be negative all by themselves or may step into a concord structure. 
What makes things even more difficult is the proneness of indefinite 
pronouns to undergo diachronic changes, through which they sometimes 
leave the indefinite domain altogether (e.g. via a ‘Jespersen’ path to 
sentential negation). Their exact distribution is therefore often 
difficult to pin down from a purely synchronic perspective.

As a consequence of these difficulties, many contemporary linguists have 
investigated the occurrence of indefinite pronouns in specific sets of 
contexts rather than determining a single reading for any given pronoun, 
e.g. with the help of semantic maps as proposed by Haspelmath (1997). 
This, however, raises the question of how the contexts for indefinite 
pronouns can be characterized or defined independently, and the question 
remains how much meaning is to be attributed to the pronouns themselves, 
and how much is contributed by the context. Moreover, the relationships 
between major sub-classes of indefinite pronouns, as well as their 
relations to other types of (non-indefinite) pronouns and grammatical 
categories, have not received much attention. For example, the study of 
‘impersonal’ indefinites such as 'one' is typically separated from that 
of ‘personal’ indefinites such as 'someone', 'anyone' and 'no one'. The 
impersonal indefinites are furthermore linked up with personal definites 
such as 'you' or 'we' as well as with non-pronominal strategies of 
impersonal indefiniteness such as the passive (see e.g. Malchukov & 
Siewierska forthcoming).

In our workshop we aim to bring together semantically oriented scholars 
working on indefinite pronouns from a diachronic and/or comparative 
point of view in order to discuss questions like the following:
* How can the contexts licensing specific types of pronouns be 
characterized?
* What is the relationship between (licensing) contexts and the lexical 
content of the relevant pronouns?
* What types of historical development can be observed? Which of them 
are restricted by universal principles and which ones seem to be more or 
less random?
* What types of patterns of polysemy are attested, and with what frequency?
* How do negative pronouns relate to sentential negators?
* How do impersonal and personal indefinites relate to one another?
* How do impersonal indefinites relate to personal definites?

Some fifteen years have passed since Haspelmath (1997) and the field 
shows no signs of waning. It is time to take stock and explore new avenues.

References:
Haspelmath, Martin (1997). 'Indefinite Pronouns'. Oxford: Oxford 
University Press.
Malchukov, Andrej and Anna Siewierska (forthcoming). 'Impersonal 
Constructions: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective'. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
De Swart, Henriëtte (2010). 'Expression and Interpretation of Negation'. 
Dordrecht: Springer.