[Lingtyp] CfP - Counterfactuals: Families of constructions - Workshop at SLE 57, Helsinki, 21-24 August 2024

Tue Sep 19 15:22:02 UTC 2023

Dear colleagues,
We hereby send you the Call for Papers of our proposed workshop “Counterfactuals: Families of constructions” at SLE 57 in Helsinki, 21 – 24 August 2024.

Convenors: Jesus Olguin Martinez (Illinois State University), Tom Bossuyt (Ghent University), Ellison Luk (KU Leuven)

Keywords: counterfactuals, usage-based approach, grammar network, family of constructions, conditionals, insubordination, typology

Deadline: provisional 300-word abstracts by 10 November 2023.

Description
Counterfactual constructions convey the speaker’s belief that the actualization of a situation was potential – possible, desirable, imminent, or intended –, but that it did not take place, i.e. it did not belong to the actual world (Verstraete 2005: 231). While counterfactuals have mostly been studied in formal-semantic frameworks (e.g., Baker 1970; Iatridou 2000; Ippolito 2003; Karttunen 1970; Kratzer 1981; Lewis 1973; Reinhart 1976; von Fintel 2001; inter alia), few studies have explored counterfactuals from a functional perspective (but see Olguin Martinez & Lester 2021; Van linden & Verstraete 2008; Verstraete & Luk 2021). The goal of this workshop is to help fill this gap. Counterfactuals are typically associated with the kind of conditional construction exemplified in (1). However, they may show up in other guises as well, e.g. hypothetical manner constructions as in (2), various non-prototypical conditionals such as the concessive-conditional example in (3), or ‘if not for NP’ constructions as in (4).

(1)          If I had known that, I wouldn’t have appointed him.

(2)          The child is crying, as if I had hit him.

(3)          Even if I had told you, you wouldn’t have come.

Khmer (Austro-Asiatic)
(4)          baeu      kom       baːn       kun        bawn     preah    loːk         cuaj,
                if             NEG       get         merit     grace     lord        monk    help
                ‘Without the help of God,

                srac        bat                         tev         haeuj.
                ready    disappear            go           already
                I would have been lost.’ (Haiman 2011: 226)

Apart from complex sentences, counterfactuality can also be expressed by simple clauses. In many languages, these are structurally similar to the main clause of a conditional counterfactual construction as in (5) and (6) (Van linden & Verstraete 2008: 1888).

(5)          I should have done it!

(6)          I would have come this morning!

Other languages have a construction that could be regarded as a counterfactual conditional construction with an elided main clause as in (7) (Kawachi 2014: 91). These instances are known in the literature as ‘counterfactual wishes’ and seem to be the result of insubordination (Evans & Wanatabe 2016).

(7)          If only she had come!

The counterfactual constructions discussed above form a FAMILY OF CONSTRUCTIONS. In recent years, this notion has established itself in Construction Grammar as a label for sets of constructions with a similar meaning or function, often despite striking differences of form (Diessel 2019: 199-200; Leuschner 2020; Ruiz de Mendoza Ibanez et al. 2017; Vander Haegen et al. 2022). Family resemblances should be considered a synchronic reflection of the ongoing diachronic emergence of the constructions in question. Unlike the derivation processes assumed in the classic version of generative grammar, associative connections between constructions reflect the language users’ experience with particular patterns (Croft 2001; Diessel 2019). Analyzing families of constructions can allow us to formulate not only hypotheses about how existing schemas may be used to categorize novel linguistic experiences, but also hypotheses about the linear arrangement of linguistic elements, and associative connections between individual lexemes and specific slots of constructional schemas.

Aims of the workshop
The workshop will bring together original research that contributes to our understanding of the range and limits of crosslinguistic variation of counterfactual constructions. Thanks to descriptions of the forms, syntactic strategies, and semantic profiles of such constructions in a given language, family, or macro-area, the workshop will pave the way for a typology of counterfactuals. Potential contributions include, but are not restricted to, the following:

1. TAM values. What are the profiles of the TAM values that are associated with counterfactual marking (e.g., irrealis, frustrative, past tense; cf. Overall 2017: 492; von Prince 2019; von Prince et al. 2022)? How do the semantics of certain language-particular “irrealis” categories and counterfactuality relate to each other? If a language contains more than one type of counterfactual construction, do they occur with the same TAM values?

2. Clause-linking markers. If a language contains multi-word counterfactual connectives, what are the building blocks of the multi-word expression? What motivates their co-occurrence? What determines the linear order of the building blocks of multi-word counterfactual connectives (i.e. sequential relations; Diessel 2019: 15)?

3. Diachrony. What are the diachronic sources of grammatical markers used for encoding counterfactual constructions?

4. Optionality. Clause-linking markers and/or TAM values may be optional in that can be omitted without affecting the meaning of the construction. What are the factors that may lead speakers to omit TAM or clause-linking markers from a counterfactual construction?

5. Language contact. Are counterfactual constructions prone to diffusion? What are the mechanisms involved in the development of counterfactuals through language contact?

6. Filler-slot relations. In many languages, speakers can choose to verbalize counterfactual thoughts/experiences in different ways (e.g., If only she had gone! vs. I wish she had gone!). The question is: Do these counterfactual constructions appear with the same verbs in a particular slot? The co-occurrence patterning of lexemes and constructions is functionally motivated (Gries & Stefanowitsch 2004: 99), giving rise to a joint distribution of lexemes in constructions that are known in the literature as filler-slot relations (Diessel 2019: 20).

7. Discourse functions. Counterfactuals may develop intriguing discourse functions. For instance, in many languages around the world, hypothetical manner constructions may develop into insubordinate constructions with exclamative force (e.g. as if he had a lot of money!; Olguin Martinez 2021).

Please send provisional abstracts of no more than 300 words (excluding references) in PDF format by 10 November 2023 to the following email addresses:

jfolguinmartinez at gmail.com<mailto:jfolguinmartinez at gmail.com>
tom.bossuyt at ugent.be<mailto:tom.bossuyt at ugent.be>
ellisonluk at gmail.com<mailto:ellisonluk at gmail.com>

If the workshop is approved, authors will be asked to submit revised 500-word abstracts according to the SLE guidelines.

References
Baker, C. Lee. 1970. Problems of polarity in counterfactuals. In Jerrold Sadock & Anthony Vanek (eds.), Studies Presented to Robert B. Lees by his Students, 1-15. Edmonton: PIL Monograph Series 1, Linguistic Research Inc.
Croft, William. 2001. Radical construction grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Diessel, Holger. 2019. The grammar network. How linguistic structure is shaped by language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Evans, Nicholas & Honoré Watanabe. 2016. The dynamics of insubordination: An overview. In Nicholas Evans & Honoré Watanabe (eds.) Insubordination, 1-38. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Gries, Stefan Th. & Anatol Stefanowitsch. 2004. Extending collostructional analysis: A corpus-based perspectives on ‘alternations’. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9. 97-129.
Haiman, John. 2011. Cambodian (Khmer). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Iatridou, Sabine. 2000. The grammatical ingredients of counterfactuality. Linguistic Inquiry 31. 231-270.
Ippolito, Michela. 2003. Presuppositions and implicatures in counterfactuals. Natural Language Semantics 11. 145-186.
Karttunen, Lauri. 1971. Subjunctive conditionals and polarity reversals. Papers in Linguistics 4. 279-296.
Kawachi, Kazuhiro. 2015. Insubordinated conditionals in Kupsapiny (Kupsapiiny, Kupsabiny). Asian and African Languages and Linguistics 9. 65-104.
Kratzer, Angelika. 1981. Partition and revision: The semantics of counterfactuals. Journal of Philosophical Logic 10. 201-216.
Leuschner, Torsten. 2020. Concessive conditionals as a family of constructions. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 34. 235-247.
Lewis, David. 1973. Counterfactuals. Oxford: Blackwell.
Olguin Martinez, Jesus. 2021. Hypothetical manner constructions in world-wide perspective. Journal Linguistic typology at the crossroads 1. 2-33.
Olguin Martinez, Jesus & Nicholas Lester.  2021. A quantitative analysis of counterfactual conditionals in the world’s languages. Italian Journal of Linguistics 33. 147-182.
Overall, Simon. 2017. A typology of frustrative marking in Amazonian languages. In Alexandra Aikhenvald & R.M.W. Dixon (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of linguistic typology, 477-512. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Reinhart, Tanya. 1976. Polarity reversal: Logic or pragmatics? Linguistic Inquiry 7. 697-705.
Ruiz de Mendoza Ibanez, Francisco Jose, Alba Luzondo Oyon, & Paula Perez Sobrino. 2017. Investigating the construction. In Francisco Jose Ruiz de Mendoza Ibanez, Alba Luzondo Oyon, & Paula Perez Sobrino, Constructing families of constructions: Analytical perspectives and theoretical challenges, 1-16. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Vander Haegen, Flor, Tom Bossuyt, & Torsten Leuschner. 2022. Emerging into your family of constructions: German [IRR was] ‘no matter what’. Constructions and frames 14. 150-180.
Van linden, An & Jean-Christophe Verstraete. 2008. The nature and origin of counterfactuality in simple clauses: Cross-linguistic evidence. Journal of Pragmatics 40. 1865-1895.
von Fintel, Kai. 2001. Counterfactuals in a dynamic context. In Michael Kenstowicz (ed.), Ken Hale: A life in language, 123-152. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
von Prince, Kilu. 2019. Counterfactuality and past. Linguistics and Philosophy 42. 577-615.
von Prince, Kilu, Ana Krajinovic, & Manfred Krifka. 2022. Irrealis is real. Language 98. 221-249.
Verstraete, Jean-Christophe. 2005. The semantics and pragmatics of composite mood marking: The non-Pama-Nyungan languages of Northern Australia. Linguistic Typology 9. 223-268.
Verstraete, Jean-Christophe & Ellison Luk. 2021. Shaking up counterfactuality: Even closer to the linguistic facts. Theoretical Linguistics 47. 287-296.

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