[Lingtyp] Call for abstracts: Interaction of means and functions in the coding of reference

Sat Feb 26 04:20:18 UTC 2022

Dear Friends,
Below is the call for abstracts for the workshop: Interaction of formal means and functional categories in the coding of reference

If you have any questions please email me or Zarina Estrada Fernández
With our best wishes,
Zygmunt

Call for abstracts
Interaction of formal means and functional categories in the coding of reference
Short title: Interaction of means and functions in the coding of reference
University of Sonora, Hermosillo, Nov. 14-15, 2022

Abstracts are sought for 30-minute presentations, followed by 10 minutes of discussion.  The deadline for abstracts is May 15. The selection for the workshop will be announced by May 30.
Organizers: Zarina Estrada Fernández (University of Sonora)
                        Zygmunt Frajzyngier (University of Colorado)

There exists rich literature on individual formal means and their functions, forms alone, or functions alone in the coding of reference. Thus, numerous studies deal with pronouns, person, demonstratives, class and gender systems, agreement, deixis, anaphora, logophoricity, reference tracking, switch reference, and other forms and functions across languages. Unlike many of the previous studies, the presentations at the Workshop will focus on the interaction of various formal means and functions in a broad variety of languages. The workshop will also deal with the implications of reference systems for the formation of clauses and sentences and the interpretation of their meanings.
The overall aims of the workshop are: (1) discovery of similarities and differences in and among references systems in a broad range of language families; (2) implications of the reference systems for theories and methodologies of semantic analysis; and (3) implication of reference systems for syntactic theories.
The term ‘reference system’ designates all functions within the grammatical system of the given language, including the indication of whether the addressees should identify the referents of participants in the proposition (not necessarily a clause) and, if so, how they should identify the referents.
      The importance of reference systems consists of the role they play in (1) the formation of utterances, including clauses and sentences, and (2) the interpretation of meanings of utterances. With respect to the formation of clauses, the systems of reference in some languages determine whether or not nouns, noun phrases or pronouns are included in the clause . This fact affects the fundamental premise of some syntactic theories, namely that the formation of clauses consists of combining various constituents into larger units. With respect to (2), the systems of reference enable speakers to perform fundamental tasks in interpreting the meaning of clauses, viz. the identification of the participants in the proposition and their roles in the proposition, regardless of whether the participants are overtly coded or not. Studies of reference systems so far increasingly indicate that an analysis of the meaning of a clause or a sentence cannot be confined to the clause or the sentence alone and must take into consideration a larger part of discourse. Similarly, an explanation of the syntax of a clause cannot be confined to the clause alone and must take into consideration larger chunks of discourse. What these larger chunks are is an open question that may well be answered by analyses of systems of reference.

      There exists rich literature on the individual formal means and their functions, on forms alone, or on functions alone. Publications and the scope of literature include:

a.       Pronouns (Frei 1944, Hagège 1986, Haspelmath 1997, Bhat 2004, Gast and van der Auwera 2013). Some studies, e.g. Comrie 1997, 1998.

b.      Demonstratives and determiners (Diessel 1999a and b, 2014, Stark, Leiss and Abraham 2007, Ghomeshi, Paul, and Wiltschko 2009, Levinson et al. 2018).

c.       Agreement (though not all studies claim that agreement is a coding means in the reference system) (Frajzyngier1997, Lehmann 1988, Corbett 2006, Haspelmath 2013). Some studies postulate gender to be a means for the coding of reference (Martinet 1967, Frajzyngier and Shay 2003), while others do not (Corbett 1991 and papers in De Vogelaer and Janse (eds.) 2011).

d.      Person (Siewierska 2004, Baerman and Corbett 2013).

e.       Definite and indefinite articles and definiteness (Lyons 1999, Dryer 2013a and b).

f.        Anaphora and reference tracking (Comrie 1997, 1998, Croft 2013).

g.      Switch reference (Stirling 1993).

     Among studies that look at the totality of reference systems are Stirling (1993); Gundel and Hedberg (2016), Kibrik (2011, 2013); and Frajzyngier (in press).

Please send your abstracts to:
zarinaef at gmail.com<mailto:zarinaef at gmail.com>
Zygmunt.Frajzyngier at Colorado.edu

Invited speakers:

Scott Delancey, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR
Katharina Haude, SeDyl-CNRS, Paris
Marianne Mithun, University of California, Santa Barbara
Maarten Mous, Leiden University
Seongha Rhee, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul, Korea.

Selected references
Bhat, Shankara D.N. 2004. Pronouns. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Baerman, Matthew, and Greville G. Corbett. 2013. Person by other means. In Bakker, Dik, and Martin Haspelmath (eds.). Languages across boundaries. Studies in Memory of Anna Siewierska. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 1-14.

Comrie, Bernard. 1997. Pragmatic binding: Demonstratives as anaphors in Dutch. Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Pragmatics and Grammatical Structure, 50-61.
Comrie, Bernard. 1998. Reference tracking: Description and explanation. Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung (STUF) 51.1: 335-346.
Corbett, Greville G. 1991. Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Corbett, Greville G. 2006. Agreement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Croft, William. 2013. Agreement as anaphora, anaphora as coreference. In Bakker, Dik, and Martin Haspelmath (eds.). 2013. Languages across boundaries. Studies in Memory of Anna Siewierska. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 95-117.
De Vogelaer, Gunther, and Mark Janse (eds.). 2011. Special Issue. The diachrony of gender marking. Folia Linguistica 45.2
Diessel, Holger. 1999a. Demonstratives. Form, function, and grammaticalization. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Diessel, Holger. 1999b.The morphosyntax of demonstratives in synchrony and diachrony. Linguistic Typology 3.1-49.
Diessel, Holger. 2014. Demonstratives, frame of reference, and semantic universals of space. Language and Linguistics Compass 8(3), 116-132.
Frajzyngier, Zygmunt. 1997. Pronouns and agreement: systems interaction in the coding of reference. In Atomism and binding. Hans Benis, Pierre Pica, and Johan Rooryck (eds.), Dordrecht: Foris, 115-140.
Frajzyngier, Zygmunt. 2018a. Toward a typology of reference systems. Languages and Linguistics 79.1-44.

Frajzyngier, Zygmunt. 2018b. Information structure and reference systems: Toward a non-aprioristic typology. Fernandez-Vest and Van Valin 2016. Journal of Language Contact, 11, 139-165.
Frajzyngier, Zygmunt. (in press). A typology of reference systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Frajzyngier, Zygmunt, Meichun Liu, and Yingying Ye. 2020. The reference system of Modern Mandarin. Australian Journal of Linguistics, vol. 40.1., 30 pages. https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2019.1698512
Frajzyngier, Zygmunt, and Erin Shay. 2003. Explaining language structure through systems interaction. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Frei, Henri. 1944. Systèmes de déictiques. Acta Linguistica 4.111-129.
Gast, Volker, and Johan van der Auwera. 2013. Toward a distributional typology of human impersonal pronouns based on data from European languages. In Bakker, Dik, and Martin Haspelmath (eds.). 2013. Languages across boundaries. Studies in Memory of Anna Siewierska. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 119-158.
Ghomeshi, Jila, Ileana Paul, and Martina Wiltschko (eds). 2009. Determiners. Universals and variation. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Gundel, Jeanette K., and Nancy Hedberg. 2016. Reference and cognitive status: scalar inferences and typology. In J. M.M. Fernandez-Vest and R. D. Van Valin (eds.), Information structuring of spoken language from a cross-linguistic perspective, 33-53. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Gundel, Jeanette K., and Barbara Abbott (eds.). 2019. The Oxford Handbook of Reference. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hagège, Claude. 1986. 2nd ed. La structure des langues. Paris: Presses Universitaire de France.
Haspelmath, Martin. 1997. Indefinite pronouns. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Haspelmath, Martin. 2013. Argument indexing: conceptual framework for syntactic status of bound pronouns. In Bakker, Dik, and Martin Haspelmath (eds.). 2013. Languages across boundaries. Studies in Memory of Anna Siewierska. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 197-226.
Kibrik, Andrej A. 2011. Reference in discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kibrik, Andrej A. 2013. Peculiarities and origins of the Russian referential system. In Bakker, Dik, and Martin Haspelmath (eds.). 2013. Languages across boundaries. Studies in Memory of Anna Siewierska. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 227-262.
Lehmann, Christian. 1988. On the function of agreement. In Ferguson, Charles A., and Michael Barlow (eds.). Agreement in natural languages. Approaches, theories, descriptions. Stanford: CSLI, 55-65.
Levinson, Stephen C., Sarah Cutfield, Michael J. Dunn, Nick J. Enfield, Sérgio Meira (eds.). 2018. Demonstratives in cross-linguistic perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lyons, Christopher. 1999. Definiteness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Martinet, André. 1967. Que faut-il entendre par ‘fonction des affixes de classe’? La classification nominale dans les langues négro-africaines. Paris: CNRS, 15-25.
Siewierska, Anna. 2004. Person. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stark, Elisabeth, Elisabeth Leiss, and Werner Abraham. 2007. Nominal determination. Typology, context constraints, and historical emergence. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Stirling, Leslie. 1993. Switch reference and discourse representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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