[Lingtyp] CfP: Workshop at ALT 2019 "Phasal Polarity Expressions from a Cross-Linguistic Perspective"

[Peter Arkadiev]

Dear colleagues,

let us draw your attention to the following workshop proposal at the ALT 2019 in Pavia.

Best regards.

Peter Arkadiev & Ljuba Veselinova


Workshop Proposal: Phasal Polarity Expressions from a Cross-Linguistic Perspective
Convenors:		Peter Arkadiev, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia
					Ljuba Veselinova, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

We hereby propose to organize a workshop on Phasal Polarity at the upcoming ALT Conference in Pavia (September 2019). The main purpose of the event is to re-activate the study of the phasal domain from a cross-linguistic perspective. The latest in-depth works on the subject include van der Auwera (1998), van Baar (1997), Plungian (1999). They are now close to 20 years old and not much has been done in this topic since then.
Phases have to do with the beginning of a situation, its continuation and its end. Van Baar (1997) notes that the linguistic encoding of phasal polarity (PhP) differs along the lexico-grammatical scale. In many languages, phasal meanings are expressed lexically by adverbials. Thus, in English, phasal adverbials include "already", which indicates that an (expected) situation has come into existence; "no longer", which indicates that a situation has ceased to exist; "still" refers to a situation that persists, and "not yet" describes a situation that has not come into existence despite expectations that it would. In other languages, PhP is encoded by morphological means (as e.g. in Abkhaz); in still others, expressions of phasal meanings are morpho-syntactically free but distributionally close to the grammatical pole in terms of frequency of use and abstractness of function (as e.g. in Atayal, Gorbunova 2014). Moreover, different or even similar phasal meanings can be expressed by different means in a single language (as e.g. in Lithuanian with two‘still’-expressions: the adverbial "dar" and the prefix "tebe-", Arkadiev 2011). This suggests that the distinction between “heavy” (lexical, emphatic) and “light” (grammatical, semantically bleached) expressions introduced by Wälchli (2006) for ‘again’-markers may be relevant for the phasal domain as well.
The labels used to refer to phasal grams or corresponding phasal adverbials are "inchoative", for a beginning phase, "contituative", for a continuing phase and "terminative/discontinuative", for an ending/closing phase. In contrast to the relative unity of naming the phasal expressions just mentioned, there is a great deal of variation in referring to grammaticalized NOT-YET expressions. Comrie (1985: 54) uses the English based term "not-yet tense"; Schadeberg (2000: 12) calls them "tardative", Plungian (1999: 319) dubs them "cunctative" from the Latin verb "cunctari" ‘hesitate, delay’. Van der Auwera refers to the corresponding adverbials as "negative contituative". Chappell & Peyraube (2016: 487) label them "markers of imminent negation". Kozinskij (1988) observes that among various “anti-resultative” expresssions such as ‘no longer’, ‘not at all’, ‘not sufficiently’, ‘not-yet’ expressions are the only ones known to be encoded by special grammatical means in the languages of the world. Yet this observation remains to be checked by a broader cross-linguistic data. Generally, it seems that the ‘not yet’ category as such exists in many languages but it has rarely been approached from a comparative perspective. Veselinova (2017) is focused on addressing this issue.
There are currently two ongoing projects which investigate these phenomena. One of them is Phasal Polarity in African Languages, led by Raija Kramer, University of Hamburg. The other one is Expectations shaping grammar led by Ljuba Veselinova, Stockholm University.
Kramer (n.d.), has developed six parameters under which PhPexpressions can be discussed: coverage, pragmaticity, telicity, wordhood,expressibility and paradigmaticity. The first three parameters are used to describe the semantics of PhP expressions, while the last three are concerned with their structure. She also ran a very successful workshop on this topic in February 2018, https://www.aai.uni-hamburg.de/afrika/php2018/medien/program-php.pdf. A volume is planned to appear under the auspices of De Gruyter Mouton.
While taking Kramer’s parameters into account and also generalizing them beyond the African context, the main questions which we would like to address both for individual languages and also in cross-linguistic perspective are listed below.
•	Lexicalization patterns/expressivity of PhP expressions
•	The paradigmatic relatedness of PhP expressions, e.g. to what extent they form a system and how they interact with (different types of) negation.
•	The diachrony of PhP expressions
  o	Their origin in other lexical and/or grammatical domains.
  o	Their further development into more conventionalized/grammaticalized markers which in turn are parts of domains such as tense-aspect-mood marking, negation etc. in their respective languages.

We hereby invite papers on the topics listed above and also on related issues. If the workshop is successful, we will see to have a publication, probably as a special journal issue.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
At this point, please indicate your interest to participate and also a preliminary title. If the workshop is accepted by the ALT Program Committee, the abstracts will have to be submitted by the general ALT 2019 submission deadline in early 2019. 
Deadline:				NOVEMBER 10, 2018 
Submission email:	ljuba at ling.su.se

REFERENCES
Arkadiev, Peter M. 2011. On the aspectual uses of the prefix be- in Lithuanian. Baltic Linguistics 2, 37–78. 
Chappell, Hilary & Alain Peyraube. 2016. A typological study of negation in Sinitic languages: Synchronic and diachronic views. In: New Horizons in the Study of Chinese: Dialectology, Grammar, and Philology. The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2016, 483-534. http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/ics/clrc/yue/31_hilary_chappell.pdf
Gorbunova, Irina M. 2014. Kategorija fazovoj poljarnosti v atajalʹskom jazyke [Phasal polarity in Atayal]. Voprosy jazykoznanija 3, 34–54. http://issuesinlinguistics.ru/pubfiles/34-54_Gorbunova.pdf 
Kozinskij, Isaak Š. 1988. Resultative: results and discussion. Typology of resultative constructions, Nedjalkov V. P (ed.), 497-525. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Kramer, Raija. Position paper on Phasal Polarity expressions. https://www.aai.unihamburg.de/afrika/php2018/medien/position-paper-on-php.pdf.
Plungian, Vladimir. 1999. A typology of phasal meanings. Tense-Aspect, Transitivity and Causativity: Essays in honour of Vladimir Nedjalkov, Abraham W. & L. Kulikov (eds.), 311-322. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Schadeberg, Thilo C. 2000. Schon - noch - nicht - mehr: das Unerwartete als grammatische Kategorie im Swahili. Frankfurter afrikanische Blätter 2.1-15. G42.
van Baar, Tim. 1997. Phasal Polarity Amsterdam: IFOTT.
van der Auwera, Johan. 1998. Phasal adverbials in the languages of Europe. Adverbial Constructions in the Languages of Europe, J. van der Auwera & D.P. Ó Baoill (eds.), 25-145. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Veselinova, Ljuba. 2017. Expectations shaping grammar: searching for the link between tense-aspect and negation. Paper presented at the Twelth Bi-annual Conference of the Association for Linguistic Typology, Australian National University, Canberra.
Wälchli, Bernhard. 2006. Typology of heavy and light again or the eternal return of the same. Studies in Language 30.1, 69–113.



-- 
Peter Arkadiev, PhD
Institute of Slavic Studies
Russian Academy of Sciences
Leninsky prospekt 32-A 119991 Moscow
peterarkadiev at yandex.ru
http://inslav.ru/people/arkadev-petr-mihaylovich-peter-arkadiev