26.4221, Calls: General Linguistics, Language Documentation, Typology/Sweden

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LINGUIST List: Vol-26-4221. Fri Sep 25 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.4221, Calls: General Linguistics, Language Documentation, Typology/Sweden

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Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2015 14:11:45
From: Seppo Kittilä [seppo.kittila at helsinki.fi]
Subject: Evidentiality, Egophoricity and Engagement: Descriptive and Typological Perspectives

 
Full Title: Evidentiality, Egophoricity and Engagement: Descriptive and Typological Perspectives 

Date: 17-Mar-2016 - 18-Mar-2016
Location: Stockholm, Sweden 
Contact Person: Henrik Berqvist
Meeting Email: henrik.bergqvist at ling.su.se

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Language Documentation; Typology 

Call Deadline: 30-Nov-2015 

Meeting Description:

It has become increasingly clear over the last 20 years that epistemicity in language houses a number of distinct notions and categories that are only partly related to a well explored notion like modality, which by some has been equated with the very notion of epistemicity found in different parts of grammar. The aim of the symposium is therefore to contribute to the ongoing exploration of epistemic marking systems in lesser-documented languages from the Americas, Papua New Guinea, and Central Asia from the perspective of description and cross-linguistic comparison. 

As the title of the symposium suggests, part of this exploration consists of comparing already established categories such as evidentiality to the diversity of systems found in individual languages. We briefly describe the categories that serve as a theme for the symposium:

Evidentiality is a category whose core function is to specify how information about an event was acquired. As a grammatical category, evidentiality has been the subject of a substantial amount of research over the last 30 years and the number of descriptions of diverse evidential systems has grown along with an increasing number of documented and described languages form all parts of the world. 

Egophoricity is a typologically unusual grammatical category that indicates whether one of the speech-participants was involved in a talked-about event. Egophoric markers are prototypically restricted to occur in utterances with agentive first, or second person subjects, but the pragmatically conditioned meaning inherent to these forms makes this prototypical distribution subject to change in different languages, where they can occur with third person and non-agentive subjects. 

Engagement, finally, is a recently proposed category that focuses on the distribution of knowledge and attention between the speech-participants in terms of (intersubjective) (a)symmetries where the speaker makes assumptions about the addressee’s knowledge/ attention of an event as either shared with the speaker or non-shared, a contrast that entails the potentially diverging epistemic perspectives of both speech-participants. Languages, on which the proposed category of engagement is based, are spoken in South America, the Himalayas, and Papua New Guinea.

The symposium brings together researchers working with first and second-hand data relevant to the notion of epistemicity, as sketched above, in order to explore new avenues of research and methods for comparing analyses of different, but purportedly related systems. Participants come mainly from Stockholm University and Helsinki University as part of a newly instated collaboration program, but the organizers invite proposals from outside researchers working on epistemicity in language, using first hand data, or typological approaches. The symposium will, however, not be able to cover travel and accommodation costs outside of already invited speakers. 

Call for Papers:

Proposals for presentations can be submitted to Henrik and Seppo as an email attachment before November 30, 2015. Abstracts should be no more than 500 words (excluding references and examples) in pdf or ms-word format. If you have any questions about the symposium, don’t hesitate to contact the organizers.

Henrik Bergqvist: henrik.bergqvist at ling.su.se 
Seppo Kittilä: kittila at mappi.helsinki.fi




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