27.3363, Calls: Gen Ling, Historical Ling, Semantics/USA

Tue Aug 23 19:12:34 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-3363. Tue Aug 23 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.3363, Calls: Gen Ling, Historical Ling, Semantics/USA

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Date: Tue, 23 Aug 2016 15:12:15
From: Jadranka Gvozdanovic [Jadranka.Gvozdanovic at slav.uni-heidelberg.de]
Subject: Development of Aspect and Tense Systems

Full Title: Development of Aspect and Tense Systems 
Short Title: Aspect and Tense Developments 

Date: 03-Aug-2017 - 03-Aug-2017
Location: San Antonio, Texas, USA 
Contact Person: Jadranka Gvozdanovic
Meeting Email: Jadranka.Gvozdanovic at slav.uni-heidelberg.de

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Historical Linguistics; Semantics 

Call Deadline: 01-Dec-2016 

Meeting Description:

Linguistic construal of time lies at the center of language; it is also one of
the cognitive foundations of culture. Construal of time categories can frame
the situation semantics so as to either focus on boundedness (in the sense of
Verkuyl 1972) or blend it out; it enables different conceptualizations of the
inner temporal constituency of situations (in the sense of Comrie 1976) that
constitute the category of aspect. In addition to aspect (as
situation-internal time), there is also situation-external time,
conceptualized as relatively ordered temporal intervals, yielding the category
of tense. The essential similarity of aspect and tense lies in the temporal
framing of situations by aspect and the relative ordering of these frames by
tense. Historical developments have reflected this similarity in transfers of
formatives (such as the -s- aorist ending becoming a marker of perfectivity in
a part of early Indo-European, or desinence similarity between the imperfect
and the imperfective aspect in medieval Slavic) and constraints on
aspect-tense formations. 

This workshop aims at going one step further than the usual research by
analyzing the systematic and functional details of such processes in the
context of the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic properties of the discussed
languages. 

For the development of aspect, the following major strategies are usually
mentioned: univerbation of preverbs to yield prefixes; stem modification
(including reduplication e.g. in Indo-Aryan); and paraphrasis with verbs of
movement, etc. However, all these strategies affect lexical aspect, whereas
grammatical aspect as a (possibly hierarchically branching) binary temporal
category does not seem to be captured by them. 

The workshop will discuss processes which can lead - and have led - to the
development or simplification of aspect and tense systems, including their
mutual interaction. Based on a clear definition of lexical aspect as a
property of the predicate and of grammatical aspect as a temporal framing of
the situation that overlays lexical aspect (cf. Gvozdanović 2012) with a
propensity to participate in higher language levels, this workshop will also
discuss the influence of scoping sentential elements (e.g. temporal
adverbials) on aspect and tense. Another possible topic is temporal structures
in narratives and their semantic, cognitive and informational properties. 

Special attention will be paid to typology. Even genetically closely-related
languages exhibit differences in the construal of temporal categories,
especially of aspect (e.g. Dickey 2000 concerning Slavic). The emergence of
radically different aspect and tense systems, as a rule, never stands alone,
but occurs as part of integrated space-time construals (cf. also Gvozdanović
2015) in typologically different systems (such as e.g. Celtic vs. Germanic or
Romance). Development of temporal categories in a typological context will be
another major focus.

The workshop aims to cover developments in different language families, but
its organization will hinge on categories and problems of identification. In
this sense, it will contribute to theory and methodology in addition to
language description. Language contact and typology will play a major role
throughout, not only for understanding sources of the relevant developments,
but also for gaining more general insights into the formative properties of
language types.

Call for Papers:

We invite individuals to submit contributions on the construal of time
categories in different languages and language families from a diachronic
perspective. Contrastive and typological perspectives will be especially
welcome, but other approaches, including in-depth studies, are also very much
invited.

Abstracts should be a maximum of two pages in length, including references,
and should be submitted via the conference Easy Chair link
(https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ichl23).  (If you have problems using
Easy Chair, please contact the ICHL organizers at ichl23 at utsa.edu.) Authors
may present a maximum of two papers at ICHL23, whether single-authored or
co-authored. Please note that abstracts submitted for this workshop but not
accepted there will be automatically considered for inclusion in the general
session.

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