35.3628, Calls: SLE 2025 Workshop : ‘Turn out' verbs and constructions crosslinguistically: Properties and boundaries, synchrony and diachrony

Sat Dec 21 23:05:02 UTC 2024

LINGUIST List: Vol-35-3628. Sat Dec 21 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.3628, Calls: SLE 2025 Workshop : ‘Turn out' verbs and constructions crosslinguistically:  Properties and boundaries, synchrony and diachrony

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Date: 19-Dec-2024
From: Patrick Dendale [patrick.dendale at uantwerpen.be]
Subject: SLE 2025 Workshop : ‘Turn out' verbs and constructions crosslinguistically:  Properties and boundaries, synchrony and diachrony

Full Title: SLE 2025 Workshop : ‘Turn out' verbs and constructions
crosslinguistically:  Properties and boundaries, synchrony and
diachrony
Short Title: SLE2025 - WS23

Date: 26-Aug-2025 - 29-Aug-2025
Location: Bordeaux, France
Contact Person: Patrick Dendale
Meeting Email: patrick.dendale at uantwerpen.be
Web Site:
https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2025/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2024/10/Workshop-SLE-2025-Turn-out-verbs-and-constructions-PROV.pdf

Linguistic Field(s): Discipline of Linguistics

Call Deadline: 15-Jan-2025

Meeting Description:

Background:
The idea for this workshop goes back to the SLE2024 talk: “‘Turn out’
verbs in European languages: Are they evidentials or something else?”
(Dendale et al. 2024). ‘Turn out verbs’ are verbs such as s’avérer
(French), blijken (Dutch), resultar (Spanish/Catalan), rivelarsi,
emergersi, venire/ uscire/ saltare fuori (Italian); ispostaviti se,
ispasti (Serbian) that can be translated by English turn out, more
precisely by it turns out that in constructions like (1)-(5):
  (1)   Après plusieurs essais, il s’est avéré que ce choix n’était
pas judicieux. (frTenTen23)
'After several attempts, it turned out that this choice was not wise.'
  (2)   Al snel bleek dat er geen camping was. (nlTenTen20)
  ‘It quickly turned out that there was no campground.’
  (3)   Y resultó que la semilla no era tan buena como dijeron.
(spTenTen18)
  ‘And it turned out that the seed was not as good as they said.’
  (4)   Si è rivelato che non era né un aereo né un velivolo
conosciuto. (itTenTen20)
‘It turned out that it was neither a plane nor a known aircraft.’
  (5)   Kada smo dosli tamo na lice mesta, ispostavilo se da ski pass
za 6 dana košta […] 145€. (MacocuSerb)
  ‘When we arrived there on the spot, it turned out that the ski pass
cost 145 euros.’

In the mid-90s, turn out verbs have started to be categorized as
‘evidential markers’ (e.g. Nuyts 1994:178, Cornillie 2007, Vliegen
2010, 2011, Tobback & Lauwers 2012, Mortelmans 2022, Miecznikowski
2018): markers indicating how the speaker acquired the information in
the sentence (by inference, hearsay or direct perception), viz.
markers expressing “source of knowledge/information”. Turn out verbs
have often been paired with seem verbs (e.g. Cornillie 2007, Aijmer
2009, Vliegen 2011, Mortelmans 2017), considered – rather
uncontroversially – inferential evidentials. But some scholars prefer
to describe them as appear verbs (e.g. Nuyts 1994, Miecznikowski 2018,
Mortelmans 2002a).
The categorization of turn out verbs as evidentials was challenged by
Dendale (2019a, 2019b) and Dendale et al. (2024), in particular when
used in the impersonal that-construction (see (1)-(5)). The core
argument was that it is not the verbs themselves that indicate the
type of source of knowledge but the context in which these verbs
appear or the type of content they qualify.

Main questions and focus of the workshop:

If turn out verbs do not indicate how the speaker acquired the
information contained in the sentence, they cannot be evidentials. But
what then do they indicate?

According to the most recent study (Dendale et al. 2024), turn out
verbs express the emergence of new knowledge, presented as verified
true, retrospectively correcting or completing previous knowledge. The
knowledge often appears surprising, a property that earned them the
label “mirativity markers” (e.g. Serrano-Losada 2017, 2020 for
resultar; Mortelmans 2022 for blijken). Semantically, turn out verbs –
in the languages already looked at – seem to be ‘achievement’ type
events (Vendler 1957). Unlike ‘discovery-verbs’ (Clark 2010, Dendale
2019) like to find out, scopririsi, they are non-agentive and
primarily ‘content-centered’. They have only one thematic role, an
Object, representing knowledge that is signified to have emerged, to
have ‘come to light’ (Dendale et al. 2024), and they focus on the
emergence of that knowledge, rather than on the search and discovery
events that preceded (and which the achievement verb presupposes).
Through these verbs, the speaker indicates that a new state of
knowledge is acquired, but without mentioning the speaker’ role in
that. These kinds of verbs, therefore, appear in impersonal
constructions with a that-clause, (1)-(5), in subject-raising
constructions and in parenthetical constructions (x, as it turns out,
p).
This preliminary account of what can be called ‘turn out semantics’
would benefit from being documented and assessed for its usefulness in
researching other languages.

Call for Papers:

We invite scholars to submit 500-word abstracts for 20-minute talks
during the Workshop, to be held at the 58th SLE Conference, Bordeaux,
26-29 August 2025. Deadline for submitting abstracts in Easychair is
January 15, 2025.

We expect contributions to the workshop to suggest answers to the
above mentioned questions for 'turn out' verbs and constructions in
different languages. We look forward to new semantic characterizations
and/or critical assessments of existing ones, in the same vein as
earlier scholarship (e.g. Vliegen 2011, Serrano-Losada 2017a/2017b,
Miecznikowski 2018, Mortelmans 2022, Dendale et al. 2024).

Possible types of contributions:
 - Contributions to the workshop can be single-language descriptive
studies (e.g. corpus studies), aimed at cataloging turn out verbs in
different languages and understanding their syntactic features as well
as their lexical and pragmatic meanings.
 - Because of the crosslinguistic perspective adopted, we welcome
typological studies or comparative studies (based on parallel corpora
or direct translation equivalents).
 - Contributions can be both synchronic and diachronic ones.
 - There is also insight to be expected from sociolinguistic and
language acquisition studies: How and when do children discover these
verbs?
 - Contributors are free to work within any framework or language
model: construction grammar, grammaticalization theory, semantic
primes, functional or cognitive grammar, formal semantics, etc.
 - Finally, contributions can be theoretical, conceptual, and
argumentative: arguments in favor of/against earlier categorizations
of turn out verbs as evidentials, miratives, epistemic modals or
aspectual markers.

Research topics and questions:
 • Inventory of the syntactic constructions turn out verbs can have in
different languages.
 • Meaning differences among co-existing turn out verbs in specific
languages.
 • Relations of polysemy in turn out verbs, distinguishing between
‘turn out meanings’ and other, ‘non-turn out meanings’.
 • Boundaries and membership criteria of the ‘turn out category’, its
general characterization, and the criteria by which ‘prototypical’
turn out verbs contrast with ‘peripheric’ ones or ‘non-turn out verbs’
(French Il s’avère que versus Il se trouve que; Italian si è rivelato
versus si è scoperto; English wind up/end up versus turn out) and the
question whether turn out verbs can be considered a legitimate
‘category’ in linguistics.
 • The most appropriate name for this ‘new’ category: ‘discovery
verbs’, ‘appear verbs’, ‘dynamic appear verbs’, ’come to light verbs’,
‘happenstance verbs’…
 • Turn out verbs in relation to mirativity, evidentiality, and
epistemic modality.
 • Divergent lexicalizations of turn out expressions in different
languages and their motivation (metaphorical or other); the role and
meaning of particles in the meaning of phrasal turn out verbs (out in
English turn out, fuori in Italian saltare fuori,…).
 • The evolutionary processes involved in the turn out verb semantics,
represented in mental maps.
 • The aspectual properties (Aktionsart) of turn out verbs: Do these
hold true across all languages?
 • The restrictions on the tenses in which turn out can appear
(progressive form, conditional, future), their respective frequencies,
and the meaning differences they generate.

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