28.2754, Calls: Ling Theories, Pragmatics, Psycholing, Semantics, Syntax, Typology/Germany

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-28-2754. Tue Jun 20 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.2754, Calls: Ling Theories, Pragmatics, Psycholing, Semantics, Syntax, Typology/Germany

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Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2017 12:27:04
From: Kata Balogh [Katalin.Balogh at hhu.de]
Subject: Specificity, definiteness and article systems across languages

 
Full Title: Specificity, definiteness and article systems across languages 
Short Title: ArtSyS18 

Date: 07-Mar-2018 - 09-Mar-2018
Location: Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg, Germany 
Contact Person: Kata Balogh
Meeting Email: artsysworkshop at gmail.com
Web Site: http://artsysworkshop.wordpress.com 

Linguistic Field(s): Linguistic Theories; Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics; Semantics; Syntax; Typology 

Call Deadline: 20-Aug-2017 

Meeting Description:

It has been observed that a multitude of the world’s languages can do without
formal marking of the concepts of definiteness and specificity through
articles (see e.g. Dryer 2013a-b, Dayal 2017, Czardybon 2017, Šimík 2014).  At
the same time languages like some North American Indian languages have been
described as having up to 12 different articles (e.g. Lakota, Ullrich 2016),
making fine-grained distinctions not only with respect to animacy and
countability, but also with respect to different types of givenness in
discourse. One of the main questions that inspires this workshop is how
languages with and without an article system go about referent coding and
helping the hearer to recognize whether a given NP should be interpreted as
definite, specific or non-specific.

Hawkins (2004) regards the use of articles as pragmatically redundant,
assuming that the discourse context should suffice to determine whether a noun
phrase is definite or not. Tanaka (2011) suggests that a language without an
article system like Japanese employs deictic strategies through all levels of
grammar, while a language like English is said to use more anaphoric than
deictic strategies in discourse and grammar. In order to explain the
development of article systems, certain grammatical features, e.g. the loss or
lack of certain nominal categories, have been argued to be influential. For
example, Hewson & Bubenik (2006) find a correlation between the loss of case
marking and the rise of an article system. Hence a second central question of
the workshop concerns the grammatical consequences of having or lacking an
article system.

Different typologies have been suggested with respect to articles systems.
Jenks (to appear) assumes three types of languages: (i) bipartite languages
with two separate articles for anaphoric and unique definites (e.g. Germanic
languages and Lakhota), (ii) marked anaphoric languages with a definite
article restricted to anaphoric definite environments (e.g. Fante Akan and
some Wu Chinese dialects) and (iii) generally marked definite languages with a
single definite form used in both contexts (e.g. English). Schaeffer and
Matthewson (2005) propose that languages differ in that article distinctions
rely on the state of the common ground between speaker and hearer in some,
while others  rely on speaker beliefs. So a third question concerns the
specific semantic-pragmatic parameters along which article systems may vary.


Call for Papers:

The workshop will bring together researchers from theoretical linguistics,
psycholinguistics, typology, semantics and pragmatics, and seeks to stimulate
an interdisciplinary discussion.

Topics of interest:

We invite submissions in the topics including (but not limited to):
- grammatical implications of having an article system vs. not having any
articles at all
- the (dis-)similarity with respect to reference coding in languages with and
without article systems
- the contextual restrictions on the omission of articles in languages with an
article system
- the psycholinguistic implications of the different ways of coding
definiteness and specificity across languages

Formatting requirements:

We invite anonymous abstracts of max. 2 pages long (A4 format, font size min.
12pt and margins of 2cm).
Every author can submit at most one single-authored and one co-authored
abstract. 

Submission:

Please submit your abstract(s) via EasyChair following the link:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=artsys18
Abstracts must be submitted no later than August 20, 2017.




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