34.2964, Confs: Functional Categories, Dimensions of Meaning, and Expletiveness

Tue Oct 10 19:05:02 UTC 2023

LINGUIST List: Vol-34-2964. Tue Oct 10 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.2964, Confs: Functional Categories, Dimensions of Meaning, and Expletiveness

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Date: 10-Oct-2023
From: Xavier Villalba [Xavier.Villalba at uab.cat]
Subject: Functional Categories, Dimensions of Meaning, and Expletiveness

Functional categories, dimensions of meaning, and expletiveness

Date: 12-Jun-2024 - 14-Jun-2024
Location: Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain
Contact: Xavier Villalba
Contact Email: Xavier.Villalba at uab.cat
Meeting URL: https://sites.google.com/view/intercat2/functional-catego
ries-dimensions-of-meaning-and-expletiveness

Linguistic Field(s): Pragmatics; Semantics; Syntax
Subject Language(s): English (eng)

Meeting Description:

We aim at exploring the hypothesis that functional categories also
contribute to the expressive meaning associated with
sentences/utterances, and therefore contribute to the grammar of
speech acts. While constructions making use of functional categories
to convey expressive meanings, that is, the emotions and attitudes of
the speaker at the time of performing a speech act have received
attention in the linguistics literature, they have been typically
factored out of syntax, and placed in a separate representation level
dedicated to not at-issue meaning or, alternatively, they have been
integrated in the left-periphery of the sentence. We would like to
discuss these views and investigate the role of expressive meaning in
the process of updating the common ground. This conference will bring
together researchers from a variety of fields to explore the
relationship between functional categories and meaning, with a focus
on three specific topics:
1.      Functional categories and speech act information. The
influential work by Krifka on the topic of questions (Krifka 2001,
2015a, 2015b), as well as his recent work on Commitment-based
Semantics ((Krifka 2018, 2019, 2021); see also (Geurts 2018, 2019,
2022)) has paved the way for a better understanding of the role of
interrogative sentences at the time of different sorts of updates of
the common ground, and involving various sorts of commitments of
speakers and a variety of forms to restrict future discourse
developments. However, such a seminal work has not yet been extended
to provide a detailed analysis of the full gamut of interrogative
sentences in Romance and Germanic languages, where interrogatives
display a rich set of syntactic forms, interpretative nuances and
prosodic contours. Moreover, exclamations and exclamative sentences
are still understudied and new proposals are necessary for analyzing
their differences with interrogatives at the level of private and
public commitment and articulating a detailed map of active functional
categories.
2.      Strengthening and dimensions of meaning. The question of what
(in)definiteness means and how it is expressed in languages that do
not possess overt articles still presents an unresolved problem in
formal approaches. In recent research on Russian (Seres 2020; Seres et
al. 2021; Seres and Borik 2021) it is argued that the default
interpretation of bare nominals in Russian is indefinite, whereas
definiteness results from a pragmatic strengthening mechanism. This
hypothesis is corroborated by existing (although still scarce)
experimental evidence (Serés et al. 2023; Šimík and Demian 2020). Some
questions, though, are yet unanswered, such as what kind of mechanisms
give rise to this pragmatic strengthening and how precisely they bring
out a definite interpretation for a bare nominal, and what is the role
of anaphoricity, ontological uniqueness, and topicality. This topic is
also worth investigating in relation to the gesture / sign interface
(especially on different dimensions of meaning and expressiveness).
3.      Expletiveness and expressive Speech Acts. While syntactic
expletives do not affect the truth-conditions of propositions by
definition, recent works on semantic expletive elements have
systematically remarked the existence of special meaning nuances
associated with the use of expletives (Delfitto et al. 2019; Greco et
al. 2018; Tsiakmakis and Espinal 2022). This topic raises several
theoretical questions: Are expletives always linked to an expressive
meaning? Can this expressive meaning be accounted for with a
commitment-based semantics approach? Which functional elements are
more prone to become expletives?

Invited speakers
1.      Manfred Krifka (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Anna Kocher (Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt)
2.      Markus Steinbach (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen) &
Cornelia Ebert (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)
Jon Ander Mendia (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
3.      Alda Mari (Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS)
Evripidis Tsiakmakis (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

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