35.3033, Calls: 58th SLE Workshop: From Explicit to Implicit: Constraints and Explanations

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-35-3033. Thu Oct 31 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.3033, Calls: 58th SLE Workshop: From Explicit to Implicit: Constraints and Explanations

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Date: 30-Oct-2024
From: Hongling Xiao [hongling.xiao at uclouvain.be]
Subject: 58th SLE Workshop: From Explicit to Implicit: Constraints and Explanations


Full Title: 58th SLE Workshop: From Explicit to Implicit: Constraints
and Explanations

Date: 26-Aug-2025 - 29-Aug-2025
Location: Bordeaux, France
Contact Person: Hongling Xiao
Meeting Email: hongling.xiao at uclouvain.be

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Pragmatics;
Psycholinguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics; Typology

Call Deadline: 15-Nov-2024

Meeting Description:

This is a workshop proposal to be held at the 58th SLE conference. The
deadline for official proposal submission, together with abstracts
from tentative participants, is on November 20. Therefore, we are
inviting you to submit your preliminary abstract (max. 300 words) to
hongling.xiao at uclouvain.be before November 15, 2024. Upon the official
acceptance of the workshop proposal, you will be contacted to submit
your full abstract (max. 500 words) in EasyChair before January 15,
2025.

Workshop description:

This workshop seeks to deepen our understanding of linguistic
flexibility in communication, focusing particularly on optional
linguistic formulations - instances where explicit and implicit forms
of a linguistic structure, convey essentially the same meaning. Some
examples are:
 • optional discourse connectives: Such as “because” and “but” which
can mark explicitly coherence relations at the discourse level. E.g.,
He studied hard at the exam, (but)he still failed, unfortunately.
 • variations in specificity: The choice between expressions with
varying degrees of specificity, e.g., I walked (vs. went) to the
store.  or the use of an ambiguous rather than specific connective,
e.g., He worked very late, and (instead of ‘but’) he was already up at
dawn.
 • argument drop (pro-drop): Particularly common in languages like
Chinese, Japanese, and Portuguese, where both subject and object
pronoun can be omitted when recoverable from context. For example, in
Chinese:
    A:  你喜欢这部电影吗？ (Do you like this movie?)
    B:  —不喜欢—. ([I do] Not like [it].)
 • functional words: Such as “that” “where” and “which” introducing
complement and relative clauses. E.g., This is the place (where) we
met for the first time.
 • bare infinitives vs. infinitives with "to": e.g., “help do” vs.
“help to do.”

Below are some theories and hypotheses that attempt to account for
such phenomena:
 • Are certain forms preferred systematically in written, spoken, or
computer-mediated communication, given the differences in time, space
and immediacy between writer/speaker and reader/listener?  And how do
genre conventions influence linguistic choices?
 • How do linguistic choices evolve over time, especially in response
to the prevalence of digital communication, which brings new genre
features regarding language use at multiple levels?
 • Do cognitive biases, such as the tendency to read consecutive
propositions in a text as temporarily continuous or causally related,
influence
the linguistic formulations of continuous (e.g., causal, additive) and
discontinuous (e.g., adversative, concessive) relations? And how do
the variant formulations, such as implicit vs explicit signaling of
these relations, influence the online processing of such connections,
given the default assumptions?
 • How do typological differences impact language structure and use?
For example, pro-drop in German is limited to the sentence initial
positions, whereas Chinese and Japanese permit more extensive pro-drop
(Huang and Yang, 2024; Schäfer, 2021). Scientific discourse in French
displays greater lexical variation, whereas English tends to pack
information more densely with frequent reuse of the same lexical items
(Hamilton and Carter-Thomas, 2017).
 • Is the selection of linguistic form listener-oriented, attending to
listeners’ interpretive competence and cognitive load, or is it more
speaker-oriented, prioritizing ease and efficiency in production?
 • How does the distribution of information density across an
utterance influence ellipsis or “redundancy”? For instance, the
coherence relations between consecutive clauses may be encoded via
multiple devices, not only the prototypical discourse connectives but
also alternative lexical and syntactic signals. How do these elements
balance over the whole utterance to achieve a uniform information
density as an optimal strategy for communication?

We look forward to collaborative and dynamic discussions, which we
believe will bring fresh and/or complementing insights, especially
regarding inconsistencies or partial confirmations found in the
literature. These findings suggest complex interplay of factors such
as cognitive bias, genre, medium (written, oral, digital), as well as
typology of language. Together, we hope to deepen our understanding of
the constraints underlying the selection of optional linguistic
formulations as well as their impact on language production,
processing, and comprehension.



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