[Lingtyp] 2nd CfP: ISSLaC IV

[Van Valin, Robert]

Information Structure in Spoken Language Corpora IV

Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf

20-21 July 2020
Second Call for papers: Deadline 30 January 2020
Invited speaker: Nomi Erteschik‑Shir, Ben Gurion University of the Negev

ISSLaC is a biennial platform for researchers interested in the grammar-discourse interface in typologically diverse languages. In many papers on information structure (IS) a strict top-to-bottom approach with predefined IS-categories is adopted, so that the role of IS research often boils down to the identification of the structures that express the assumed categories. The ISSLaC workshop series concentrates on the discourse-roots of information packaging, i.e. its relation to rhetorical structure, intentionality of communication, the cognitive states of the interlocutors, different discourse genres and narrative strategies. This means that we look at IS from a bottom-up perspective. ISSLaC III was concerned with different empirical approaches to the typological study of information packaging in discourse. ISSLaC IV will keep pursuing the question as to which empirical and analytical tools are best for IS research.
In addition to abstracts on the general topic of IS, we also wish to solicit comparative papers that deal with different construction-choice inducing narrative strategies depending on discourse genre or language type.  We are especially interested in the question whether different languages or text genres exhibit different defaults with respect to narrative strategies or information structural packaging. We hope to solicit papers that address this question as well as papers that give us more insight into all the devices used to signal the assumptions about the hearer’s knowledge and attention, or to render transparent rhetorical relations, or the current intentions of the speaker. We are especially interested in abstracts addressing the following issues:

  *   IS and construction choice: What differences in IS-interpretation do we find between morphosyntactically identical or similar constructions in related and unrelated languages?

•       IS and referent tracking: How are discourse referents with different degrees of discourse relevance encoded? More specifically, looking at head-marking and dependent-marking languages with extensive argument pro-drop, do we find a difference with respect to the IS-function of realized arguments; is it always about focality?

  *   IS categories and mode of realization: Even in topic- or focus-configurational languages prosody has been shown to be relevant to a certain sub-type of IS-categories. Do we find a more systematic correlation as to what IS-categories morphosyntax in contrast to prosody is used for?
  *   Rhetorical relations between utterances and IS: Is there a conventionalised connection between rhetorical relations such as elaboration, cause, parallelism, etc. on the one hand and certain types of IS configurations on the other?
  *   Intentional structure of discourse and IS: Do certain speaker intentions regularly trigger certain types of IS? Is there a tendency for some types of speech acts such as questions and answers, corrections, commands, etc. to be associated with certain IS strategies?
  *   Interpersonal stance and IS: Are some linguistic structures, which appear to be IS-related, also related to interactional aspects of the message such as different types of politeness or hedging?

Abstracts should be anonymous and no longer than two pages, including data and references.  Please submit your abstract to:  altjohan at phil.uni-duesseldorf.de<mailto:altjohan at phil.uni-duesseldorf.de>
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