[Lingtyp] Call for abstracts: SLE2019 workshop proposal "Tense, aspect and mood categories across languages"

Wed Sep 26 19:32:36 UTC 2018

*Call for abstracts: Tense, aspect and mood categories across languages*

Convenors: Kilu von Prince, Ana Krajinović, Jozina Vander Klok

*Abstract submission guidelines*

We are inviting contributions of short abstracts for the workshop 
/Tense, aspect and mood categories across languages/to be proposed to 
the 52^nd Annual Meeting ofSocietas Linguistica Europaea (SLE) 2019 to 
be held at Leipzig University in Germany from August 21-24, 2019. 
Interested participants should write a provisional abstract (max. 300 
words) with their name and affiliation and send to 
tamcalsle2019 at gmail.com <mailto:tamcalsle2019 at gmail.com>by November 9th, 
2018. We will then submit a provisional list of workshop participants 
along with your abstracts by Nov. 20th to SLE for consideration, and let 
you know about the outcome. More information about the conference can be 
found here: <http://sle2019.eu/call-for-papers>.

Please share and spread the word to others who might be interested!

*Workshop description*

There is a proliferation of terms in the study of tense, aspect and 
modality (TAM). But it is not always clear what the relation between 
those terms is.

In some cases, several terms appear to refer to phenomena that are 
functionally very similar. This might be the case with continuous and 
progressive aspect, or irrealis, potential and hypothetical mood. In 
other cases, one category might be a special case of another category, 
for example habitual sentences are sometimes described as a special case 
of generic statements (Krifka et al. 1995) or, more generally, of 
imperfective aspect (Comrie 1976). We would like to bring together 
perspectives from language documentation and language-specific 
description, typology, formal and functional approaches to semantics and 
pragmatics, as well as syntax and morphology to discuss relations 
between TAM terms cross-linguistically.

We also welcome contributions that specifically address discrepancies 
between linguistic subdisciplines, or to state it from another 
perspective, how different linguistic frameworks might constrain or 
create more freedom in their approach to accounting for TAM semantic 
properties.For instance, typologists often come to different conclusions 
from formal semanticists when it comes to the classification of TAM 
categories. Typologists tend to assume that cross-linguistic differences 
in the distribution of particular TAM expressions are based on their 
lexical semantic definition. By contrast, in formal semantics some of 
these differences can be derived from various language-internal 
structures and processes, such as paradigmatic effects.

Examples for this include:

* English simple past has a discontinuous implicature in connection with 
stative verbs as in "Rose is in the hospital. She had trouble breathing" 
-- such an utterance implicates that Rose is now better able to breathe. 
Altshuler & Schwarzschild (2012) argue that this implicature is a result 
of the contrast of English simple past and simple present.

In some languages, such discontinuous interpretations are however not 
restricted to stative verbs. This has led Plungian & van der Auwera 
(2006) to diagnose a specific typological category of "discontinuous 
past". By contrast, Cable (2016) and von Prince (2017) have argued that 
in those languages, too, the discontinuous interpretation is a result of 
the paradigm in which the past markers find themselves, rather than a 
function of their lexical meaning.

* The category of "iamitive aspect" has been introduced by Olsson (2013) 
and Dahl & Wälchli (2016) as similar to, but separate from, both perfect 
aspect and "already". One of its defining features is the 
change-of-state interpretation that iamitives show in connection with 
stative verbs, unlike Indo-European perfects. But more recent research 
argues that these interpretations may equally be expressed by perfect 
aspect (Krajinović 2018 for Nafsan) because of language-specific 
processes (also compare the analysis of "already" by Vander Klok & 
Matthewson (2015) for Javanese). This poses a general question of 
whether the different functions of perfect attested cross-linguistically 
can be explained by language-specific effects, and how different would 
these functions need to be to justify establishing a new typological gram.

* Languages that do not have obligatory tense marking are commonly 
categorized as tenseless. But Matthewson (2006) has argued 
thatSt’a´t’imcets has a zero tense morpheme, which restricts the 
temporal reference of a clause to non-future tense. By contrast, Mucha 
(2012) argues for Hausa that it is genuinely tenseless and that temporal 
reference is determined by pragmatic defaults.

* This divide between sub-disciplines is also reflected in how modal 
meanings are categorized. Thus, the distinction between 
participant-internal and participant-external modalities, which is 
fundamental to typological studies of modality (e.g. Bybee et al. 1994, 
van der Auwera & Plungian 1998), is not reflected in the formal 
semantics discourse on modality (e.g. Portner 2009).

Independent fromparticular theoretical perspectives, there are manycases 
in which the relation between categories it not entirely clear, for 
example: How does iterativity relate to pluractionality? What is the 
relation between sequentiality, prospective aspect and perfect aspect, 
frequentatives and habituals, progressive and continuous aspect? What is 
the relation between "timitive", "avertive", "apprehensive" modality, 
also called "volitive of fear" (Vuillermet 2018)?

How many modal distinctions such as "deontic" and "circumstantial" do 
languages mark grammatically?

We invite contributions from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives, 
including language documentation and description, typology, semantics 
and pragmatics, syntax, and morphology. We particularly welcome 
submissions on understudied or underdocumented languages.Possible topics 
for submission include:

* Descriptive case studies of a specific TAM marker or paradigm;

* Typological studies of the distribution of certain categories;

* Formal and functional approaches to specific TAM categories;

* Formal and functional approaches to the grammaticalization/diachrony 
of specific TAM categories;

* Interdisciplinary studies that compare different approaches.

*References*

Altshuler, Danieland Roger Schwarzschild. 2012. Moment of change, 
cessation implicatures and simultaneous readings. In Emmanuel Chemla, 
Vincent Homer, and Gr ́egoire Winterstein, editors, /Proceedings of Sinn 
und Bedeutung/ 17, Paris.

Bybee, Joan L., Revere D. Perkins & William Pagliuca. 1994. /The 
Evolution of Grammar: Tense, aspect, and modality in the languages of 
the world./ Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dahl, Östen & Bernhard Wälchli. 2016. Perfects and iamitives: two gram 
types in one grammatical space/. Letras de Hoje/ 51(3). 325–348. 
doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.15448/1984-7726.2016.3.25454.

van der Auwera Johan and Vladimir A. Plungian. 1998. Modality’s semantic 
map. /Linguistic typology/, 2(1):79–124.

Cable, Seth. 2016. The implicatures of optional past tense in Tlingit 
and the implications for ’discontinuous past’. /Natural Language & 
Linguistic Theory/.

Comrie, Bernard. 1976. /Aspect/. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics. 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Krajinović, Ana. The semantics of perfect in Nafsan. Paper presented at 
The Semantics of African, Asian, and Austronesian Languages (Triple A) 
5, 27–29 June 2018, Konstanz, 2018. https: 
//semanticsofaaa2018.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/krajinovic_slides.pdf.

Krifka, Manfred, Francis J Pelletier, Gregory N Carlson, Gennaro 
Chierchia, Godehard Link, and Alice Ter Meulen. 1995. Introduction to 
genericity. In Gregory N Carlson and Francis J Pelletier, editors, /The 
Generic Book/, pages 1–124. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Matthewson, Lisa. 2006. Temporal semantics in a supposedly tenseless 
language/. Linguistics and Philosophy/, 29:673–713.

Mucha, Anne. 2012. Temporal reference in a genuinely tenseless language: 
the case of Hausa. /Proceedings of SALT/, 22:188–207.

Olsson, Bruno. 2013. Iamitives: /Perfects in Southeast Asia and beyond./ 
Stockholm University. MA thesis.

Plungian, Vladimir A.and Johan van der Auwera. 2006. Towards a typology 
of discontinuous past marking. /Sprachtypologische 
Universalienforschung/ 59:317–349.

Portner, Paul. 2009. /Modality/. Oxford University Press.

Vander Klok, Jozina and Lisa Matthewson. Distinguishing already from 
perfect aspect: A case study of javanese /wis/. /Oceanic Linguistics/ 
54(1):172–205, 2015.

von Prince, Kilu. Paradigm-induced implicatures in TAM-expression: A 
view from the Daakaka distal. In /Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung/ 21, 
Edinburgh, 2017.

Vuillermet, Marine. 2018. Grammatical fear morphemes in Ese Ejja: Making 
the case for a morphosemantic apprehensional domain. /Studies in 
Language/ 42(1), 2018.

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