29.5106, Calls: Discourse Analysis, Phonology, Pragmatics, Syntax, Typology/Germany

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-29-5106. Wed Dec 26 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.5106, Calls: Discourse Analysis, Phonology, Pragmatics, Syntax, Typology/Germany

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Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2018 23:19:54
From: Peter Arkadiev [alpgurev at gmail.com]
Subject: Managing Information Structure

 
Full Title: Managing Information Structure 

Date: 21-Aug-2019 - 24-Aug-2019
Location: Leipzig, Germany 
Contact Person: Peter Arkadiev
Meeting Email: alpgurev at gmail.com

Linguistic Field(s): Discourse Analysis; Phonology; Pragmatics; Syntax; Typology 

Call Deadline: 15-Jan-2019 

Meeting Description:

Managing information structure in spoken and sign languages: formal properties
and natural discourse organization

Workshop proposal for the 52nd Annual meeting of the Societas Linguistica
Europaea, Leipzig, August 21–24 2019.

As controversial as this may be in details, the very existence of such
universal phenomena as theme (topic), rheme (comment, focus), categorical vs.
non-categorical (thetic) utterances, as well as an important role of prosody
in managing information structure (IS), seem to be generally accepted and
addressed in studies on both spoken and sign modalities. The formal properties
of IS-related categories have been primarily studied on the basis of isolated
sentences, but currently the focus of attention is shifting to the interplay
between IS and the organization of natural spoken discourse. The goal of our
workshop is to follow this new line of research integrating the data of sign
languages into a broader context of IS in natural discourse production.

The scope of the workshop includes, but is not limited to, the following key
questions:

- Does the fundamental distinction between thetic and categorical utterances
on the one hand, and that between theme and rheme on the other hand, stand
against data of natural discourse in spoken and sign languages? If yes, what
are the main formal properties of these categories as they arise in corpora of
natural discourse?
- What is the exact role of prosody in delimiting IS categories in natural
speech? What approach(es) to describing intonational structure yields better
results when analyzing the information structure of spoken discourse in spoken
and sign languages?
- What are functional and structural parallels between prosodic means of
information structure encoding in spoken languages (i.e., phrasal accents,
their placement rules, tonal patterns which are associated with accents) and
prosodic means of information structure encoding in sign languages (including
non-manual prosody, i.e. face expressions, head and body movement as well as
manual prosody – pauses, speed, size and other integral characteristics of
movement in sign systems)?
- How does the grammatical structure and / or intonation inventory of a
language affect the interplay between grammar and prosody as they contribute
to encode the IS? Specifically, (a) what is the role of prosody in the
languages which grammaticalize IS marking (e.g., have grammaticalized topic);
(b) what is the role of the phrase-level intonation in tonal languages? 
- What are the possible contexts for neutralization of the theme–rheme
opposition in natural discourse? For instance, in Russian, clausal themes and
rhemes share a great number of formal properties when combined with non-final
transitional continuity, and in American Sign Language, topics and foci can be
marked by the same non-manual markers (eyebrow raise) in some contexts. Do
such contexts differ across languages?
- How are sentences with different illocutionary force integrated into the
complex hierarchical structure in spoken and sign languages? Specifically, how
are they integrated in the contexts which are sensitive to neutralizing
illocutionary force meanings, e.g. in reported speech? Which grammatical and
prosodic patterns are at play? Are prosodic signals of integrating IS
accompanied by such grammatical phenomena as indexical shift?
- What are the best practices for tagging IS in prosodically annotated spoken
and sign language corpora?
- How do gestures participate in packaging information in spoken and sign
languages?
We welcome empirically grounded contributions that address single (spoken and
sign) language phenomena or favour a cross-linguistic and cross-modal
perspective.


2nd Call for Papers:

The workshop proposal ''Managing information structure in spoken and sign
languages'' organized by Vera Podlesskaya, Vadim Kimmelman, Nikolay Korotaev
and Peter Arkadiev has been accepted by the scientific committee of SLE2019 in
Leipzig:
http://sle2019.eu/downloads/workshops/WS%2012%20Managing%20information%20struc
ture.pdf

We still might have room for a number of papers, so we invite those interested
to submit abstracts according to the general guidelines of SLE:
http://sle2019.eu/submission-guidelines (under point 2).

We welcome empirically grounded contributions that address single (spoken and
sign) language phenomena or favour a cross-linguistic and cross-modal
perspective.




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