31.2040, Confs: Syntax/France

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-31-2040. Mon Jun 22 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 31.2040, Confs: Syntax/France

Moderator: Malgorzata E. Cavar (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Student Moderator: Jeremy Coburn
Managing Editor: Becca Morris
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Everett Green, Sarah Robinson, Lauren Perkins, Nils Hjortnaes, Yiwen Zhang, Joshua Sims
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Lauren Perkins <lauren at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2020 12:41:39
From: Eric Corre [eric.corre at sorbonne-nouvelle.fr]
Subject: Conf/Journal Title	DATE	Message Subject ( Help )	Msg #	 New perspectives on aspect : from the “Slavic model” to other languages

 
New perspectives on aspect : from the “Slavic model” to other languages 

Date: 08-Apr-2021 - 10-Apr-2021 
Location: Paris, France 
Contact: Eric Corre 
Contact Email: eric.corre at sorbonne-nouvelle.fr 
Meeting URL: http://aspect2021.sciencesconf.org/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Syntax 

Meeting Description: 

In connection with the syllabus of the Agrégation externe (national
examination for secondary school teaching qualification) in English, which
includes the issue of Aspect, Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle, Sorbonne Université
and Université de Paris, with the added sponsorship of the Association des
Linguistes Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur (ALAES), are holding a
two-day international conference in April 2021:
- a whole day is devoted to aspect in English;
- the rest of the conference deals with aspect in various languages, including
Russian.

Keynote speakers :
- John Beavers (university of Texas, Austin) 
- Henriette de Swart (Université d’Anvers) 
- Astrid de Wit (Université d’Anvers) 
- Vladimir Plungian (Moscow State University) 
- Laurent Gosselin (Université de Rouen)
 

Program Information: 

Both the concept and the term “aspect”, as they are commonly used in
non-Slavic Indo-European languages, essentially come from the description of
Slavic languages, in which we find an obligatory morphological contrast
between a perfective and an imperfective verb. B. Comrie’s seminal book Aspect
(1976) contributed to the entrenchment of the Slavic model of aspect in the
theoretical descriptions of English verbal categories, alongside the
traditional concept of tense. Since Comrie & Smith (1991), many contemporary
researchers in aspectology (in and beyond the study of English) have
established a theoretical distinction between grammatical (outer, viewpoint)
and lexical (inner, situation) aspect. Viewpoint aspect (Smith 1991), being
expressed inflectionally, is manifested by a set of oppositions that largely
overlap the category of tense: simple vs. progressive, perfect vs. non perfect
constructions. According to Bertinetto & Delfitto (2000), « aspect is the
specific perspective adopted by the speaker/writer », and it is distinct from
actionality, or Aktionsart, « the type of event, specified according to a
limited number of relevant properties » (190). The notion of perspective or
viewpoint in turn sparked research into the types of non explicit
aspectuo-temporal meanings licensed by some constructions: among others, we
find the “general factual” use of the Russian imperfective (Forsyth 1970,
Glovinskaja 2001, Grønn 2004), the modal values of the English progressive
(Adamczewski 1982, Larreya & Rivière 2010), the mirative and sometimes
evidential meanings conveyed by progressives cross-linguistically (Vafaeian
2018, de Wit 2017, Vydrin 2012). Many of the works devoted to aspect have
noted paradoxes or puzzles: the “imperfective paradox” (Dowty 1979), which
allows telic predicates to co-occur with the naturally unbounded progressive;
the “present perfect puzzle” (Klein 1994), which sets out to explain the
impossible interaction between an English present perfect construction and a
specific temporal adverbial like yesterday, and more recently, the “perfective
paradox” (de Wit 2017), which seeks to account for the incompatibility between
the present tense and perfective aspect in some languages, especially Russian,
and the strategies adopted by languages to overcome it.

We find a similar wealth of theories in the domain of lexical aspect: Vendler
(1957) – but also Malsov (1947) – set the groundwork for the lexical aspectual
classifications of verbs and verb phrases (VPs) according to their inherent
temporal properties, among which the most prominent are dynamism, duration,
(a)telicity. Following Vendler, those properties were fine-tuned with the
introduction of independent features. For Verkuyl (1972, 1989, 2005) and
Krifka (1989, 1992), (a)telicity is computed from the interaction between
properties of the verb and the nominal in the VP. A crucial notion which
features prominently in all models of aspectual classifications is the
presence (or lack thereof) of a privileged endpoint to the action expressed by
the verb, the telos. Many have demonstrated that Aktionsart (the verb and its
complementation structure) and the (a)telicity associated with it, have
important repercussions in the syntax of sentences and in argument
alternations, as shown by Krifka (1992), Tenny (1994), Borer (2005), among
others. This led to the concept of an aspectual role induced by certain
distinguished arguments of the verb, in particular, the direct internal
complement with its incremental theme role. The latter is a distinguished
aspectual argument because it ensures the homomorphism between the object and
the event, which sets apart telic or quantized arguments from others
(cumulative), in turn providing independent criteria for deriving (a)telicity.
In her book Aspectual roles and the Syntax-Semantics Interface (1994),  Tenny
came up with a challenging proposal in which she defended the notion of an
aspectual role as the principle that underlies argument realization. In the
same vein, the concept of event structure (Pustejovsky 1991 ; Levin & R. Hovav
1998, 2001, 2005 ; Croft 2012) was an attempt to provide stable and
predictable principles of semantic/syntax mapping by appealing  to Aktionsart
and participative properties of verbs and their argument(s) – causation, among
others. However, classification issues started to appear with
variable-telicity verbs, also known as “degree achievements” (Dowty 1979):
verbs like widen, lengthen, cool, dry, straighten, pose a difficulty: they can
be telic or atelic if we subject them to the traditional tests for
(a)telicity. These difficulties sparked more ambitious research into how
telicity can be derived via independent features of certain verbs, in attempts
to compute the notion of change from scalar dimensions in the semantics of
those verbs. (Kennedy & Levin 2008, Beavers 2008, 2010).

The goal of this conference is to bring new perspectives on the different
domains described above; we invite talks on any of the topics below, on
English, Russian or any other language:
 
- Slavic languages, mainly Russian, have undoubtedly played a major role in
the development of the concept of aspect. It would be interesting to further
explore the question of the origin and definition of the “aspect” category
from an epistemological standpoint, contrasting it with the other verbal
category, tense (Comrie 1976, Dahl 1985). The pairing of verbs of different
aspects, “perfective/imperfective” in Slavic languages has been accepted since
the beginning of the 20th century (V.A. Bogorodickij 1904’s grammar); the
works of Agrell (1908), who introduced the concept of Aktionsart, put an end
to discussions on the number of aspects in Polish or Russian. The distinction
between perfective and imperfective is found as early as 1904 in
Bogorodickij’s grammar. In the Russian tradition, the term vid – the
grammatical category of aspect – is distinct from aspektual’nost’ –
“aspectuality”, the notional category. Therefore, we encourage talks on what
is specific about Slavic aspect and the role of Slavist linguists in the
formation of the concept.  It is interesting to observe that most grammarians
of the English language of the first half of the 20th century were busy
defining sub-classes of aspects (Curme 1931), describing the “character’
(Poutsma 1921) of English verbs, and continued to call the progressive a
“continous” ou “expanded” tense. 

- Bidimensional theories of aspect like Smith (1991)’s, continue to hold a
prominent place in most accounts of aspect. This leads to two types of issues:
1) it is necessary to distinguish between aspect as a grammatical category and
aspect as a universal, notional category, which can be expressed by different
means: many empirically-oriented approaches have shown that these means can
vary a great deal across languages, and that one often finds polysemous
aspectual clusters rather than neat oppositions between the two types of
aspect (Dik 1989, Plungian 2012); sometimes, what pertains to a lexical aspect
component in one language can be expressed grammatically in another (Tournadre
2004); 
2) it is also important to question the nature of aspect itself: in Russian,
this corresponds to the lexico-grammatical opposition between a perfective and
an imperfective verb, even if it is very difficult to sum up its exact
notional content; in other languages (including some Slavic languages like
Bulgarian), the aspectual opposition may include other types:
“accomplished/unaccomplished, aoristic/perfect”, etc. What is grammatically
expressed in Slavic languages is the perfective vs. imperfective category,
while other aspectual features are expressed lexically; in other languages,
the distribution is different. 

- However, as observed by de Wit (2017), some authors defend a unidimensional
approach to aspect, like Sasse (2002) for whom lexical and grammatical aspect
belong to a similar cognitive domain, [the domain] “of human perception of
states of affairs in terms of situations and situation changes.” (37, quoted
in de Wit 2017 :18). For these authors, aspectual meaning comes from several
domains of the grammar and interacts with other domains. We invite talks on
type-shifting or coercition-type theories of aspect, which contend that the
main function of markers of grammatical aspect is to modify the input of basic
actional types of events, and which de facto consider that grammatical aspect
and Aktionsart are of the same ontological nature (Moens & Steedman 1998, de
Swart 1998, 2000; Michaelis 2004). 

- In relation with the question of aspectual coercion, it is also essential to
further examine the different subtypes of imperfectivity: Comrie (1976)
distinguishes between two sub-domains of imperfectivity, continuous and
habitual imperfectives; the former is further divided into progressive and
non-progressive. As regards habituals, it would be interesting to try and
clarify certain notions, as in Gosselin (2013) for whom the frequentative is a
sub-type of iterative aspect. Some languages have dedicated markers: Breton
has one form of the verb bezañ, “be” in the frequentative mode, Hungarian uses
a construction with a grammaticalised form of szokott, “used to”, followed by
an infinitive, earlier Russian had the -iva/-yva suffix as a second
imperfective (pisat’, ‘write’ > pisyvat’, ‘used to write’), English has the
(semi-)modal auxiliaries would and used to, etc. Other languages such as
French, do not have a dedicated marker of multiplicity, so that frequentative
aspect emerges from the combination of several elements (scope of adverbials,
tense, etc.), which requires a mechanism of conflit resolution (Gosselin
2013).

- Concerning lexical aspect and English in particular, one important topic to
explore is the models that have proposed a unified and generalised analysis of
variable (a)telicity verbs by uncovering an independent semantic feature along
the lines of Kenney & Levin (2008:1), who contend that it is essential to take
into account “a function that measures the degree to which an object changes
relative to some scalar dimension over the course of an event”. The idea is
that an argument or co-argument of the verb contains an underlying scale or
measure function (quantity, distance, temperature, etc.) that can provide a
criterion for ordering events of drinking, cooling, running, eating, etc., and
select a possible maximal point on that scale. That in turn gives rise to
(a)telicity (Rothstein 2004, Filip 2008). The outcome of such analyses is a
classification based on independent principles: there are verbs of non scalar
change and verbs of scalar change, associated with different types of scales
(Rappaport Hovav 2008, Beavers 2008, 2010). This classification seems to
correspond to a distinction that cuts across the English lexicon, namely that
between manner and result verbs (Levin & Rappaport Hovav 2005, Levin 2010).
The conference could be the occasion to explore whether this distinction is
found in other languages, in particular those in which aspect is
grammaticalized.

- In connection with the last topic, we invite talks on the aspectuality of
the VP which can serve as an interface between the thematic structure and the
syntactic projection of arguments, as suggested in the works of Tenny (1994),
Borer (2005), etc. In particlar, it would be interesting to study the
constructions and argument alternations which affect the Aktionsart of the VP:
for English, the role of cognate objects, of the conative construction, of
fake reflexives, of resultative constructions (Rosen 1999, Borer 2005), and
for other languages (Inuktikut, Hungarian, Finnish, etc.), the phenomena of
antipassive constructions, the role of cases, of verbal prefixes, etc.





------------------------------------------------------------------------------

***************************    LINGUIST List Support    ***************************
 The 2019 Fund Drive is under way! Please visit https://funddrive.linguistlist.org
  to find out how to donate and check how your university, country or discipline
     ranks in the fund drive challenges. Or go directly to the donation site:
               https://iufoundation.fundly.com/the-linguist-list-2019

                        Let's make this a short fund drive!
                Please feel free to share the link to our campaign:
                    https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/
 


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-31-2040	
----------------------------------------------------------