26.4741, Calls: Semantics/Italy

Mon Oct 26 17:50:59 UTC 2015

LINGUIST List: Vol-26-4741. Mon Oct 26 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.4741, Calls: Semantics/Italy

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Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2015 13:49:40
From: Marta Donazzan [mdonazza at uni-koeln.de]
Subject: The Profile of Event Delimitation

Full Title: The Profile of Event Delimitation 
Short Title: SLE-DelimitEvent 

Date: 31-Aug-2016 - 03-Sep-2016
Location: Naples, Italy 
Contact Person: Marta Donazzan
Meeting Email: mdonazza at uni-koeln.de

Linguistic Field(s): Semantics 

Call Deadline: 09-Nov-2015 

Meeting Description:

Events, as opposed to states, are largely accepted as linguistic individuals across theories and frames, although the ways in which they are defined and identified in linguistics and in philosophy is still under debate. In this workshop, we address the issue of the individuation of events by considering the strategies that are exploited across languages for delimiting single occurrences. We propose to use the notion of event delimitation as a semantically grounded notion that can serve two purposes. It can contribute to developing a principle of event individuation, and it offers a working hypothesis for gaining insights on a collection of linguistic expressions and morpho-phono-syntactic devices that may otherwise look motely.

In the linguistic literature, the issue of event delimitation has been tackled by studies that appeal to aspectual notions and has also surfaced, among others, in syntactic discussions, for instance on valence alternation and case marking. A first aspectual notion that is relevant is that of telicity. Several options have been explored in the literature to characterise the events that are endowed with such a form of delimitedness. Telicity has been expressed in temporal terms within the Vendlerian tradition, or by exploiting mereological structures—cf. Bach (1986), Krifka(1989, 1998) —or by making reference to the internal structure of the event—for instance by decomposing events into conceptual components, e.g. Travis (2000), Ramchand (2008). In empirical terms, telicity is a property of a subset of verbal predicates that can be attributed to verbal stems, as well as to verbs taken together withthe argument structure lexically or structurally associated with them, cf. the rich
  production focussing on the internal argument and its thematic relation, and on resultative complements. Another well-established notion relevant for talking about delimitation is that of perfectivity. Perfectivityis a matter of viewpoint projected on the event, and as such it is independent from the intrinsic properties of the event, strictly speaking. It brings about delimitedness by making the endpoint accessible. In empirical terms, perfective aspect is mainly expressed by inflexional and derivational morphology, e.g. aspectual prefixes, and is syntactically represented as the domain of higher aspect. Aspect, complementation and tense morphemes/adverbs appear to be extremely important ingredients. The existing wealth of work provides the empirical and theoretical background on which to rely.

Call for Papers:

The workshop aims at contributing to the debate about linguistic expressions and semantico-morpho-phono-syntactic devices for delimiting events, by focusing on expressions and constructions specifically in their use for delimiting occurrences of events. We invite contributions that enrich the empirical coverage and/or provide theoretical analyses of the topic by addressing (but are not limited to) the following phenomena:

Complementation and modification by non-canonical complements and modifiers: 
- cognate objects
- complements with not well-defined categorical status such as so-called reduplicated verbs in Sinitic languages
- measure phrases (either indefinite NPs or PPs such as English two hours/for two hours),so-called verb-copy in Mandarin Chinese

Complex predicate constructions:
- light-verb constructions (have/take a walk),
- aspectual properties of serial verbs, 
- periphrastic aspectual constructions;

Event nominalisations: 
- derived and underived event nouns in their eventive reading, 
- nomenvicis andism l-marra, their use and their morphological makeup;

Numeral verbal classifiers

Temporal structure: complex tenses and temporal periphrases that exploit temporal reference for delimiting occurrences of events (decessive/discontinuous past)

The role of the agent/experiencer in the individuation of the event;

We invite submissions of abstracts for 20 + 10 min presentations at the email address below, which should also include contact details (name, affiliation, and email address). For the first phase, please submit an abstract of max 300 words (excluding references) to be evaluated for consideration in our workshop proposal. If the workshop is accepted, we will require a full abstract submission (deadline 15 January 2016), which will undergo the general SLE reviewing process.

Submission address: delimitsle2016 at gmail.com

Submission deadline: November 9

References:

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