[Lingtyp] 57th Congress of Americanists: Workshop "Determination and the expression of definiteness in indigenous languages of the Americas" Cfp

Thu Feb 9 08:25:02 UTC 2023

Dear typologists,

there will be a workshop on "Determination and the expression of definiteness
in indigenous languages of the Americas" during the 57th Congress of
Americanists in Iguassu Falls (Foz do Iguaçu), Brazil on July 17-21, 2023. 

Abstracts for talks (20 minutes + 10 minutes discussion) of maximally one page
length (single spaced, 12pt), including references, should be sent as pdf
attachment by March 31, 2023 to the organizers of the workshop. Abstracts may
be written in English, Portuguese and Spanish, the three official languages of
the congress.

Organizers are:
Johannes Helmbrecht (University of Regensburg, Germany):
johannes.helmbrecht at ur.de 
Alejandra Vidal (University of Formosa, Argentina):
vidal.alejandra at conicet.gov.ar

Notification of acceptance will be sent out by April 30, 2023.

The final program of the workshop with the information on the room and exact
time slots of the talks will be communicated later on.  

Determination is a special kind of modification of the noun phrase that
specifies the mode of reference and converts a nominal into a noun phrase.
Functionally, determiners relate the entity designated by the nominal to the
universe of discourse by specifying the relation of the intended referent to
the set of potential referents semantically designated by the nominal, and by
marking its information status (cf. Moravcsik 1969, Leiss & Abraham (eds.)
2007, Lehmann n.d., and many others). Thus, determination is, on the one hand,
closely bound to the formal structure of the noun phrase, and on the other
hand, to the discourse-referential properties of the noun phrase (cf. e.g.,
Rijkoff 2008; Velasco & Rijkoff (eds.) 2008). Determiners are, for instance,
definite articles (cf. Bechert 1993, Bisle-Müller 1991, Christophersen 1939,
Ebert 1970, Gamillscheg 1937, Grasserie 1896, Hartmann 1982, Heinrichs 1952,
Himmelmann 2001, and many others), indefinite articles (cf. Givón 1981, Wright
& Givón 1987, Hawkins 1991, von Heusinger & Klein 2013), personal pronouns as
determiners (cf. Louagie & Verstraete 2015), demonstrative pronouns (cf.
Diessel 1999, Fillmore 1982, Himmelmann 1996, Laury 1997), adnominal
possessives (cf. Aikhenvald & Dixon (eds.) 2013, Gamillscheg 1937, Plank 1992,
Haspelmath 1999), and some quantifiers (cf. Lyons 1999:32ff).

Definiteness, on the other hand, is not a language-specific grammatical
category, as is often presupposed in descriptive grammars and even in studies
of general linguistics. It is rather a universal functional domain comprising
various semantic and pragmatic notions (cf. Chafe 1976, Hawkins 1978, Lyons
1999, Abbott, 2004, Lehmann 2015, König 2018), which in turn could be
considered as comparative concepts in the sense of Haspelmath (2010) for
language comparison (cf. also Croft 2016). The semantic and pragmatic concepts
of definiteness are familiarity and identifiability of the referent since the
intended referent is present in the universe of discourse of the interlocutors.
Further concepts that belong to this functional domain and that are discussed
in the literature are uniqueness, salience, existence, and inclusiveness (cf.
Lyons 1999; König 2018).

Determination and definiteness do overlap to some degree but are by no means
identical. Determiners may encode various aspects of definiteness in individual
languages but are - in addition - structurally defined as part of the noun
phrase. The study of determiners implies methodologically a semasiological
point of view. The study of the marking of definiteness, on the other hand,
requires an onomasiological point of view. The function and distribution of
determiners as well as the marking or not-marking of definiteness in an
individual language is strongly bound to the semantic and pragmatic status of
the referent(s) in discourse. Therefore, the study of determination and
definiteness requires text corpora as empirical basis.  

Determination and definiteness have been studied extensively for European
languages, but much less so for indigenous languages of North and South
America. It is the goal of this workshop to fill this gap. All contributions
that give answers to one or more of the following more specific questions are
welcome for this workshop: 

What are the semantic and pragmatic factors for the selection of specific
determiners in the language? What do the chosen determiners encode? What is the
information status of the referents of the NPs with different determiners? More
specifically:
Â·	Are there definite articles? indefinite articles? and how many? in the
language
Â·	What are the formal-structural properties of these articles?
Â·	What kind of semantic feature other than specific, non-specific,
generic do they distinguish (e.g., animacy, spatial orientation, shape of the
referent, and others)?
Â·	In which semantic and pragmatic contexts are they used (obligatorily,
optionally)? 
Â·	Which precise information status of the referent do they indicate?
First mention in texts? second mention? high vs. low accessibility? given vs.
new? topic vs. non-topic?
Â·	Are they used in certain specific construction: e.g., in comparative/
superlative constructions? in adpositional phrases? with possessive affixes/
possessive pronouns, lexical NPs marking the possessor? with proper names
(anthroponyms, toponyms, etc.)? to mark relative clauses? to mark subordinate
clauses (complement clauses, adverbial clauses)?
Â·	Are there demonstratives in the language? one paradigm? two or more
paradigms? 
Â·	What are the formal-structural properties if they are used
pronominally/adnominally? 
Â·	What kind of grammatical categories other than deixis (proximal,
distal, etc.) do they distinguish (gender, noun class, visibility,
aforementioned/ anaphoricity, etc.).
Â·	What informational status of the referent do they signal? and what are
the semantic and pragmatic contexts?
Â·	Are there other kinds of determiners in the language and what are their
formal and semantic/ pragmatic properties, classifiers, quantifiers, bare
nouns, and others?

Beyond determiners, how are definiteness or aspects of definiteness expressed
by other means in the sample languages? 
Â·	Languages may distinguish between a definite and indefinite inflection
of attributive adjectives (often termed "strong" versus "weak" inflection in
these languages).
Â·	Plural marking: some languages mark plural of nouns by utilizing the
third person plural pronouns; this strategy may be restricted to definite
referents.
Â·	Deviations from the regular order of constituents may indicate the
topic status of a referent and thus may indicate implicitly also definiteness.
Â·	Languages may have special morphological or syntactic constructions to
mark the topicality of a referent; usually this implies that the referent is
given in the previous discourse and hence definite.
Â·	Differential object marking (DOM). Languages may restrict the
accusative case to mark definite objects, other direct objects appearing in a
different case form, or not case marked at all; or languages mark definite
direct objects by some oblique case marker reserving the accusative or
zero-marking for other direct objects.
Â·	Similar restriction can be found in the domain of verbal agreement.
Languages that index subject and direct object pronominally on the verb may
restrict the object inflection to definite referents.
Â·	Numeral classifiers, noun classifiers, and possessive classifiers may
have anaphoric functions and may indicate definiteness.

Important dates: 

Abstracts for talks (20 minutes + 10 minutes discussion) of maximally one page
length (single spaced, 12pt), including references, should be sent as pdf
attachment by March 31, 2023 to the organizers of the workshop. Abstracts may
be written in English, Portuguese and Spanish, the official languages of the
congress.

Johannes Helmbrecht (University of Regensburg, Germany):
johannes.helmbrecht at ur.de 
Alejandra Vidal (University of Formosa, Argentina):
vidal.alejandra at conicet.gov.ar

Notification of acceptance will be sent out by April 30, 2023.

The final program of the workshop with the information on the room and exact
time slots of the talks will be communicated later on.   

References
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-- 
Professor Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht
Lehrstuhl für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft
Institut für Information und Medien, Sprache und Kultur (IIMSK)
Universität Regensburg
Universitätsstrasse 31
D-93053 Regensburg, Deutschland
Tel. 0941/943-3388
Tel. 0941/943-3387 (Sekretariat)
Fax. 0941/943-2429
Website: 
http://www-avs.uni-regensburg.de/
E-mail:
johannes.helmbrecht at ur.de

Gerade erschienen:
Caro Reina, Javier and Helmbrecht, Johannes (eds.). Proper Names versus Common
Nouns: Morphosyntactic Contrasts in the Languages of the World, Berlin, Boston:
De Gruyter Mouton, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110672626