32.3559, Confs: General Linguistics/Italy

Wed Nov 10 02:39:08 UTC 2021

LINGUIST List: Vol-32-3559. Tue Nov 09 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.3559, Confs: General Linguistics/Italy

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Date: Tue, 09 Nov 2021 21:37:33
From: Federica Cognola [federica.cognola at unive.it]
Subject: Ways of Expressing Modality. German Modal Particles from a Comparative Perspective

Ways of Expressing Modality. German Modal Particles from a Comparative Perspective 

Date: 15-Nov-2021 - 16-Nov-2021 
Location: Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy 
Contact: Federica Cognola 
Contact Email: federica.cognola at unive.it 

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics 

Meeting Description: 

Modal particles (henceforth: MPs) are small words expressing the speaker’s
attitude towards the proposition in a similar fashion to epistemic usages of
modal verbs and speaker’s oriented adverb (Weydt 1963, Thurmair 1989).  German
exhibits a wide array of modal particles, such as auch, bloß, denn, doch,
eben, ja, mal and schon, which are all special usages of words belonging to
other lexical or functional classes. When used as modal particles they have a
presuppositional meaning and share the following properties: (i) They cannot
be stressed, (ii) coordinated, (iii) focused, (iv) inflected, (v) cannot
appear in isolation (vi) nor in non-root embedded clauses and (vi) are
confined to a sentence-internal position (Mittelfeld).

MPs have long been considered to be a typical German phenomenon, which is
absent in other languages, and whose translation is thus particularly
problematic or even impossible (see discussion in Müller 2014). As a
consequence, the identification of the class of MPs has mostly been confined
to German linguistics: therefore, comparative work is not particularly
extensive and has mostly focused on written data (see Waltereit 2001 on
German-French/Italian, Masi 1996 on a German-Italian literary corpus and
Cognola/Moroni in press), or on elicited data from a single variety and on
single MPs (see Coniglio 2009, Cardinaletti 2011; Hinterhölzl/Munaro 2015,
Cognola/Schifano 2018a,b). Moreover, the scarcity of comparative work in the
area of MPs is reflected by the fact that, despite their centrality in the
language, MPs have received only a partial treatment in most materials for the
teaching of German as a foreign language based on constructed sentences (see
Pittner 2010).

The Conference aims at addressing these two fundamental gaps, namely the
reduced number of cross-linguistic investigations and of teaching materials on
MPs, and will try to provide an answer to the following research questions:

- to what extent are MPs a German phenomenon? Are MPs found in other
languages?
- why do some languages, like German, heavily rely on MPs, whereas others do
not?
- what are the differences between German MPs and MPs in other languages (for
instance Italian)?
- what strategies are available in languages different from German for
expressing the meaning of MPs?
- are there privileged morphosyntactic, lexico-semantic and conversational
environments for the use of specific German/Italian MPs? 
- to what extent does sociolinguistic variation play a role in the formal
properties of MPs in Italian and German? 
- is it possible to draw a line between colloquial and less colloquial/more
formal contexts of use of the MPs?

Program:

Day 1: Monday 15th November 2021 
Ca' Foscari, Aula Baratto  & Zoom 

9.30-10.00 
Greetings 

10.00-11.00
Maria Thurmair, University of Regensburg (keynote speaker)

Was sollten wir in der Didaktik von Modalpartikeln berücksichtigen? Einige
Anregungen

11.00 - 11.45 
Marta Massaia, University of Utrecht 

''Allora'' als Diskurspartikel des Italienischen

Lunch break

14.00-15.00 
Manuela Caterina Moroni, University of Bergamo (keynote speaker)

Die Modalpartikel ''schon'' und ihre Entsprechungen im Italienischen

15.00 - 15.45 
Peter Paschke, Ca' Foscari University of Venice

Zur korpusbasierten Untersuchung quantitativer Aspekte der
Modalpartikelverwendung im Deutschen

Coffee break 
16.30-17.15

Federica Cognola, Ca' Foscari University of Venice

German ''doch'': how to translate presupposition and contrast in Italian

17.30-18.30 
Andreas Trotzke, University of Konstanz (keynote speaker)

How to do things with German particles: The syntax-pragmatics interface in the
foreign language classroom

20.00 Social dinner 

Day 2: Tuesday 16th November 2021
Ca' Foscari, Aula Baratto  & Zoom 

10.00- 11.00 
Marco Coniglio, University of Göttingen (keynote speaker)

Ways of grammaticalizing modal particles: a German-Italian comparative
perspective

11.00-11.45 
Nicola Munaro, Ca' Foscari University of Venice

Some additional comparative remarks on ''po'' and its Dolomitic cognates

break 

12.00-12.45 
Alessandra Giorgi, Ca' Foscari University of Venice & Cecilia Poletto, Goethe
Universität Frankfurt           and University of Padua

Prolegomena to a comparative analysis of aggressive expressions in Italian and
German

Lunch Break

14.00-15.00 
Pierre-Yves Modicom, Université Bordeaux-Montaigne (keynote speaker)

German Modal Particles and recent typological perspectives on epistemicity and
assertions

15.00-15.45
Roland Hinterhölzl, Ca' Foscari University of Venice

What modal particles refer to

Coffee break

16.30-17.15
Anna Cardinaletti, Ca' Foscari University of Venice

On verb-based discourse particles

17.30-18.30 
Steven Schoonjans, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt (keynote speaker)

Modal particles and gestures: Cross-linguistic observations

Registration for attendance in presence is obligatory:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/15cWBHNdXtHYfxGlf1AeV8CNiFwki0amTf06gV0SmX3Y/e
dit?ts=6155cd77

Registration is not required for online attendance:

Zoom Meeting
https://unive.zoom.us/j/82617120393
Meeting ID: 826 1712 0393
Passcode: 4C86hp

Organisers and Scientific Referents

Federica Cognola, federica.cognola at unive.it
Roland Hinterhölzl, rolandh at unive.it
Peter Paschke, paschke at unive.it 

Segreteria Amministrativa

Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Culturali Comparati
Roberta Lina Marinelli, roberta.marinelli at unive.it
Alberto Parolo, alberto.parolo at unive.it

Contacts
federica.cognola at unive.it

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