27.2384, Calls: Lang Acq, Psycholing, Semantics, Syntax, Typology/Germany

Mon May 30 15:36:14 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-2384. Mon May 30 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.2384, Calls: Lang Acq, Psycholing, Semantics, Syntax, Typology/Germany

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Date: Mon, 30 May 2016 11:36:06
From: Ryan Bochnak [modalflavorsag at gmail.com]
Subject: Towards an Ontology of Modal Flavors

Full Title: Towards an Ontology of Modal Flavors 

Date: 08-Mar-2017 - 10-Mar-2017
Location: Saarbrücken, Germany 
Contact Person: Ryan Bochnak
Meeting Email: modalflavorsag at gmail.com

Linguistic Field(s): Language Acquisition; Psycholinguistics; Semantics; Syntax; Typology 

Call Deadline: 15-Aug-2016 

Meeting Description:

This workshop is part of the DGfS 2017 meeting in Saarbrücken, Germany.

Our understanding of modal meanings is crucially based on the notion of
various modal flavors, which distinguish, for example, between epistemic and
deontic readings. However, neither within nor across linguistic subfields is
there any consensus about the exact ontology of those modal flavors. Thus, a
common assumption in formal semantics is that there is a hierarchical
distinction between modal meanings: there is a fundamental difference between
epistemic and non-epistemic meanings, and the non-epistemic meanings can be
split further into flavors such as deontic, bouletic, etc. (e.g., Hacquard,
2011). But the seminal typological study by Bybee et al. (1994) and subsequent
work suggest that the distinction between participant-internal and
participant-external flavors may be just as significant as the distinction
between epistemic and non-epistemic ones. Moreover, current formal semantic
approaches do not predict any interesting correlation between the dimensions
of modal flavor and modal force, though Rubinstein (2012) has recently argued
for some non-trivial correlations between force and varieties of non-epistemic
modality. Meanwhile, typological research shows that the distinction between
necessity and possibility may not apply to participant-internal flavors
(Nauze, 2008). Insights from related disciplines likewise fail to converge.
Thus, experimental research indicates that the distinction between moral and
physical laws may not be as salient on a psychological level as one might
expect from traditional approaches to modal flavors (Phillips, 2015).

This workshop aims to provide a forum for researchers in formal semantics,
typology, syntax, language description, psycholinguistics and language
acquisition to address these issues in the analysis of linguistic modality, in
order to gain a better understanding of the role of modal flavors in grammar
and cognition.

Invited speaker: 
Aynat Rubinstein (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

Organizers:
Kilu von Prince (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Ryan Bochnak (University of Manchester)
Anne Mucha (Universität Potsdam)

References:
Bybee, J. L, Perkins, Revere, & Pagliuca, W. 1994. The evolution of grammar:
Tense, aspect, and modality in the languages of the world. The University of
Chicago Press.
Cinque, Guglielmo. 1999. Adverbs and functional heads: a cross-linguistic
perspective. Oxford University Press.
Hacquard, Valentine. 2011. Modality. Pages 1484–1515 of: von Heusinger, Klaus,
Maienborn, Claudia, & Portner, Paul (eds), Semantics: An international
handbook of contemporary research. de Gruyter.
Nauze, Fabrice. 2008. Modality in typological perspective. Amsterdam:
Institute for Logic, Language and Communication.
Phillips, Jonathan Scott. 2015. The psychological representation of modality.
Ph.D. thesis, Yale University.
Rubinstein, Aynat. 2012. The roots of modality. Ph.D. thesis, University of
Massachusetts, Amherst.

Call for Papers: 

We invite abstracts for talks (20 minutes presentation + 10 minutes for
questions) for the workshop “Towards an ontology of modal flavors” to take
place during the 39th Annual Meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für
Sprachwissenschaft, taking place March 8-10, 2017 at the Universität des
Saarlandes in Saarbrücken, Germany (Homepage:
http://dgfs2017.uni-saarland.de/wordpress/ , LinguistList:
http://linguistlist.org/callconf/browse-conf-action.cfm?ConfID=246576). 

We invite contributions from a variety of fields including modal logic and
formal semantics, typology, syntax, language description, psycholinguistics
and language acquisition to discuss the nature of modal flavors and address,
for example, one of the following questions:

- What are possible candidates for modal flavors?

- How strict are the boundaries between modal flavors? Are some distinctions
more fundamental than others?

- Are some of the distinctions between modal flavors based on a difference in
syntactic positions, resulting in different interactions with negation and
tense/aspect (as proposed by Cinque 1999, Hacquard 2011 and others)?

- Are the dimensions of force and flavor independent from one another?

- Are the dimensions of force and flavor sufficient to account for all the
distinctions we find in natural languages?

Abstracts should be a maximum of two pages (references may be on a third
page), using a 12-point font and 2.5cm/1 inch margins on all four sides.
Please submit anonymous abstracts in pdf format to modalflavorsag at gmail.com by
August 15, 2016. Please include your name, affiliation, and title of the
abstract in the body of your email.

Important dates:

Call deadline: August 15, 2016
Notification of acceptance: September 10, 2016
Workshop dates: March 8-10, 2017

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