[Lingtyp] Second call for papers -- SWL8 adjacent workshop -- Lest we miss them: Precautioning / Apprehensive clauses,

Wed Jan 17 10:27:07 UTC 2018

 Thank you in advance for posting this second call for papers for an adjacent workshop at the Syntax of the World’sLanguages 8 conference, Paris 3-5 September 2018:
Lest we miss them: precautioning clauses aka. lest-clauses,apprehensive, avertive & in-case clause

Conference URL: https://swl8.sciencesconf.org 
Workshop URL:   https://swl8.sciencesconf.org/resource/page/id/6  
Conveners: Marine Vuillermet (DDL-CNRS, Lyon), Eva Schultze-Berndt (U Manchester)

Submission of abstracts: Abstracts aresolicited for 20-minute presentations (plus 10 minutes for discussion). Pleasefollow the instructions for abstract submission found on the conference websitehttps://swl8.sciencesconf.org/resource/page/id/1. Remember to include the nameof the workshop in your submission.

Deadline: 31 January 2018.

The topic of this workshop are precautioningclauses, i.e. subordinate clauses encoding an undesirable event that is to beavoided, indicated by specialised markers, as in (1). 

(1) Ese Ejja (Vuillermet to appear)

E-’bakwa  iñawewa iña     po-ani, (...)     [e’bio=wasijje   e-poki      kwajejje].

NPF-child dog        grab    be-PRS          jungle=ALL       PREC-go    PREC

‘The child is grabbing the dog [lest it go tothe jungle].’

Precautioning clauses systematically associatewith an explicit preemptive clause, typically with assertive (1) or directiveillocutionary force (2). Lichtenberk (1995) further subdivides thePRECAUTIONING function into the AVERTIVE (2a) and IN-CASE functions (2b). Thetwo differ in that there is a direct causal link between the two propositionsonly in the former but not in the latter. Many authors describe precautioningclauses as “negative purpose clauses” even though such a term does not coverthe IN-CASE function.

(2) a. Take your umbrella lest you get wet /so that you won’t get wet.

    b.Take your umbrella lest/in case it rains / ??so that it won’t rain.

An example of a dedicated precautioningmorpheme is the _lest_ (archaic) in English also illustrated in (2). Thoughsuch specialised constructions seem to be rare in the Eurasian and Africanareas (Vuillermet 2015; Schmidtke-Bode 2009: 130), they are not rarecross-linguistically: Schmidtke-Bode (2009) identifies them in 19 out of 80languages, and a recent survey of 56 South American languages reports 18languages with precautioning clauses (Vuillermet 2017). 

Languages with no dedicated morphology stillhave numerous precautioning strategies, marked by connectives such as ‘ifnot+might’, ‘otherwise’, and ‘before’ as in _Put the milk into the fridgebefore it goes off_. These may or may not be restricted to undesirableconsequences. The notion of undesirability may also arise, somewhatsurprisingly, from morphemes that originally only encode possibility (Pakendorf& Schalley 2007) or temporal sequence (Angelo & Schultze-Berndt 2016). 

The precautioning morphemes identified inSchmidtke-Bode’s (2009: 130ff.) typological study on purpose clauses do notbelong to a particular syntactic category – they may be e.g. conjunctions,adverbials, adpositions, or TAM markers. Precautioning clauses tend to havetheir own specific argument structure configurations: explicit subjects aresignificantly more frequent in such clauses than in positive purpose clauses.This follows from the precautioning clauses’ overwhelming preference fordifferent subjects (36.9% vs. 5.8% in positive purpose clauses). It probablyreflects the fact that undesirable consequences mostly originate in a thirdparty, while welcome ones are often self-triggered.

In addition to the semantic subtypes, internalsyntactic structure, and morphological marking of precautioning clauses, amajor issue in the existing literature has been the potential difficulty ofdistinguishing between their dependent or independent syntactic status (e.g.Austin 1981: 229; François 2003: 304-310), due to the close pragmatic link to apre-emptive clause. 

The workshop will bring together scholarsprimarily working on lesser-known languages to study the crosslinguisticvariation of precautioning clauses with a focus on the top-ics mentioned above.Thanks to descriptions of the forms, syntactic strategies and semantic profilesof such clauses in individual languages, families or areas, the workshop willpave the way for a typology of such constructions. 

A longer version of the workshop descriptionand guidelines for abstract submission are available on the conference website,https://swl8.sciencesconf.org.

Marine Vuillermet-----
LABEX ASLAN -- Postdoctorante
 CNRS -- Dynamique Du Langage (UMR 5596)
Bureau 205C, 14 av. Berthelot, Lyon (07)
04 72 72 64 77
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