36.2674, Confs: Workshop on Discourse Coherence and Clausal Complementation at SLE 2026: Diachronic Pathways and Diagnostic Problems (Germany)
The LINGUIST List
linguist at listserv.linguistlist.org
Mon Sep 8 15:05:02 UTC 2025
LINGUIST List: Vol-36-2674. Mon Sep 08 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.
Subject: 36.2674, Confs: Workshop on Discourse Coherence and Clausal Complementation at SLE 2026: Diachronic Pathways and Diagnostic Problems (Germany)
Moderator: Steven Moran (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Valeriia Vyshnevetska
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Mara Baccaro, Daniel Swanson
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org
Homepage: http://linguistlist.org
Editor for this issue: Valeriia Vyshnevetska <valeriia at linguistlist.org>
================================================================
Date: 08-Sep-2025
From: Haiping Long [lhpszpt at 126.com]
Subject: Workshop on Discourse Coherence and Clausal Complementation at SLE 2026: Diachronic Pathways and Diagnostic Problems
Workshop on Discourse Coherence and Clausal Complementation at SLE
2026: Diachronic Pathways and Diagnostic Problems
Short Title: Workshop on complementation (SLE 2026)
Date: 26-Aug-2026 - 29-Aug-2026
Location: Osnabrück, Germany
Contact: Haiping Long
Contact Email: lhpszpt at 126.com
Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Linguistic Theories;
Pragmatics; Syntax; Typology
Submission Deadline: 10-Nov-2025
1 Björn Wiemer, 2 Haiping Long, 3 Giulia Mazzola
1 JGU Mainz (wiemerb at uni-mainz.de),
2 Sun Yat-sen University (lhpszpt at 126.com),
3 Newcastle University (Giulia.Mazzola at newcastle.ac.uk)
Until now, research on the pragmatics-syntax interface of discourse,
on the one hand, and on clausal complementation, on the other, have
been developing rather independently. This workshop aims at bringing
these two strands together, with a focus on delimitation problems
between asyndetic complementation, quotation and parenthetical comment
clauses as well as their diachronic relations.
Clausal complementation consists in “biclausal syntactic constructions
in which the predicate of one clause ‘entails reference to another
proposition or state of affairs’ (Cristofaro 2003: 95), expressed in a
second clause” (Schmidtke-Bode 2014: 7). In turn, discourse coherence
arises from continuing parts of meaning across clauses. This implies
that meaning components overlap, or are compatible (cf. Das/Taboada
2018, Haselow/Hancil 2021), regardless of how clauses connect: by mere
juxtaposition (1a), by a connective explicitly naming the relation
(because in 1b) or by one marking a subsequent clause as complement
(that in 1c).
(1a) They forgot his coffee.
(1b) Peter was upset because they forgot his coffee.
(1c) that they forgot his coffee.
Consequently, clausal complementation represents just a specific case
of coherence between adjacent clauses: the complement clause supplies
‘content’ which complies, or is compatible, with the semantic
potential of a complement-taking predicate (CTP). The latter may be
represented by verbs, nouns, adjectives or other parts of speech,
while the content may represent states of affairs or propositions.
It seems natural to posit diachronic links between looser types of
discourse-coherence and clausal complementation, and a synchronic
gradient between them. A wealth of publications has addressed the
“loose end” of discourse coherence, e.g. the emergence of
parenthetical predicates (e.g., Thompson/Mulac 1991, Vazquez Rozas
2006, Brinton 2008, Heine 2013, Heine et al. 2021), but also the
development of complementation from ‘complementation strategies’
(Dixon 2006; e.g., Arsenijević 2009, Schmidtke-Bode 2009: 157-165,
Sonnenhauser 2015, Meyer 2017, Grković-Major 2021) and the relation
between parentheticals and complementation (e.g., Schneider 2007:
177–184, Boye/Harder 2021, Mazzola 2022: 61-65). Yet, the diachronic
conditions and processes leading from discourse coherence strategies
to complementation (or vice versa) are still poorly understood.
Moreover, proposed diagnostics often do not lead to clear decisions.
For instance, the criterion of relative discourse prominence
(Boye/Harder 2021) cannot discriminate cases like (1a) or (2): if the
first clause is discourse secondary, it may be a parenthetical comment
or a matrix clause plus asyndetic complement.
Clause 1 Clause 2
(2) I think you are wrong.
We furthermore encounter competing views concerning the pathways along
which clausal complementation may arise. Consider, in particular, the
expansion and integration pathways in Heine/Kuteva (2007: 216–251):
(3) a. Clause [NP] → Clause 1 [Clause 2] Expansion
b. Clause 1 + Clause 2 → Clause 1 [Clause 2] Integration
Expansion corresponds to analogy and integration to reanalysis in
Harris/Campbell (1995). The integration pathway has dominated analyses
of complementation between balanced clauses (in Stassen’s 1985 sense)
in European languages (e.g., Jespersen 1914, Rissanen 1991), yet
evidence beyond Europe is weak, whether framed as
hypotaxis-to-embedding (Hopper & Traugott 2003) or as complementation
pathway (Long & Deng 2023). Apart from Heine/Kuteva (2007: 216–224)
and Givón (2009: 8f.), the expansion pathway is rarely treated.
Moreover, the complementation relation between a CTP and an adjacent
clause may target only the latter’s illocution (cf. Long/Deng 2023 on
Chinese), so that delimitation from quotation becomes difficult.
As for diagnostics, serious problems arise with potential
complementizers. As flags of clausal arguments, complementizers are,
again, compatible, or overlap, with a meaning component entailed by a
CTP. This insight has, in practice, been acknowledged since
Frajzyngier/Jasperson (1991), Frajzyngier (1995) and Boye/Kehayov
(2016), Long et al. (2021). Yet, debates remain as for the “expression
format” of complementizers (word, clitic, affix; clause-initial vs
clause-final, etc.; cf. Wiemer 2021; 2023a), and methodological
desiderata become particularly apparent with clause-initial units, as
in (4-5).
Clause 2 in (4) opens with a unit marking directive or optative
illocutionary force (glossed DIR), and clause-initial position
typifies complementizers in European languages. This allows for three
alternative structural interpretations: (i) niech serves as
complementizer to flag Clause 2 as an argument of the CTP (underlined)
in Clause 1; (ii) since niech can appear in self-standing utterances
(as directive-optative auxiliary or ‘particle’) we could treat (4) as
juxtaposition or (iii) as asyndetic complementation (compare with (1b)
and (2)). None of these analyses affects the function of these units
as markers of directive-optative illocutions (associated with states
of affairs); under any interpretation, the clause pair creates a
coherent piece of discourse, with the illocution of Clause 2
fulfilling the semantic requirement of Clause 1 (Mendoza et al. 2024).
Analogous issues arise with clause-initial markers of interrogative or
apprehensional illocutions and with clause-initial modifiers related
to epistemic support and/or reportive evidentiality (see 5), which
imply propositions (Wiemer 2023a; 2023b).
Clause 1
Clause 2
(4) Polish: Powiedz mu,
niech jutro przyjdzi-e do kantor-u.
say[PFV]-(IMP.SG) 3SG.M.DAT
DIR tomorrow come[PFV]-NPST.3SG to cantor-GEN
‘Tell him, may he come to the cantor
tomorrow.’ (PNC)
Clause 1
Clause 2
(5) Ukrainian: sportsmen-y zajavlja-jut’,
niby til’ky včora pro c-e
athlete-NOM.PL claim[IPFV]-PRS.3PL
REP only yesterday about this-ACC.SG
sta-l-o vidom-o.
become[PFV]-PST-N.SG known-N.SG
‘the athletes claim that it became known
only yesterday.’ (UkTenTen; Teptiuk & Wiemer, forthcoming)
After all, other cues lacking, structures as in (2) or (4-5) are
systematically indeterminate, as they oscillate between two or more
interpretations (cf. Mendoza & Sonnenhauser 2023).
Therefore, how can entailment relations between clauses be established
empirically, especially for earlier diachronic stages and spoken data?
Such problems extend to numerous discourse patterns that create grey
zones between asyndetic complementation (Mazzola 2022), parenthetical
comments (Schneider 2007, 2018) and quotation (Miglio 2010). Criteria
of distinguishing these three phenomena have been formulated, e.g., by
Serdobol’skaja (2016; 2018), Letučij (2021: 225-227), Long et al.
(2022), Long & Deng (2023). However, the criteria only apply to
relatively few contexts, so that problems of dealing with pervasive
indeterminacy persist.
Research Questions:
We invite talks that focus on at least one of the aforementioned
topics by concentrating on the relation between parameters of
discourse coherence and the establishment of clausal complementation
in contrast to parenthetical comment clauses and/or quotation. We are
especially interested in the following questions:
- What are the diachronic relations between complementation,
parenthetical comment clauses and quotation? Are criteria of
tightness, or subordination (whatever they are), indicative of the
diachronic relations between these structures?
- Which mechanisms and pathways adequately capture the rise of
clausal complementation? Which particular steps do they consist of?
A second focus addresses methodological issues:
- Which criteria can be employed as reliable diagnostics of clausal
complementation vis-à-vis parenthetical comment clauses and/or
quotation?
- How can we distinguish complementizers and other clausal
connectives from “free” illocution markers?
- How do we deal with cases in which no decision on the
morphosyntactic status of an illocution marker in a possible
complementation relation can be established?
- Correspondingly, how do we deal with discourse tokens that do not
allow for a distinction between complementation, parenthetical
comments and/or quotation? That is, in which way does our theory and
analysis account for indeterminate structures in the empirical
analysis of data?
After all,
- do all these issues depend on the grammatical architecture of
particular languages (at least partially)?
We especially welcome case studies based on diachronic corpora, spoken
language and/or material from understudied and/or non-European
language varieties, but also crosslinguistic comparisons with a clear
spell-out of the analytical and theoretical underpinnings.
Please, send abstracts of maximally 300 words length (incl. examples,
but exclusive of references) by November, 10, 2025 to any of the three
convenors (Björn Wiemer, wiemerb at uni-mainz.de; Haiping Long,
lhpszpt at 126.com; Giulia Mazzola, Giulia.Mazzola at newcastle.ac.uk).
Indicate your affiliation and e-mail connection and add 4-5 keywords.
References:
Arsenijević, Boban. 2009. Clausal complementation as relativization.
Lingua 119, 39-50.
Boye, Kasper & Peter Harder. 2021. Complement-taking predicates,
parentheticals and grammaticalization. Language Sciences 88, 1-19.
Boye, Kasper & Petar Kehayov (eds.) 2016. Complementizer semantics in
European languages. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Brinton, Laurel J. 2008. The Comment Clause in English: Syntactic
Origins and Pragmatic Development. Cambridge: CUP.
Cristofaro, Sonia. 2003. Subordination. Oxford etc.: OUP.
Das, Debopam & Maite Taboada. 2018. Signalling of Coherence Relations
in Discourse, Beyond Discourse Markers. Discourse Processes 55-8,
743-770.
Dixon, R.M.W. 2006. Complement Clauses and Complementation Strategies
in Typological Perspective. In: Dixon, R.M.W. & Aikhenvald, Alexandra
Y. (eds.). Complementɑtion, 1-48. Oxford & New York: OUP.
Frajzyngier, Zygmunt. 1995. A Functional Theory of Complementizers.
In: Bybee, Joan & Suzanne Fleischman (eds.). Modality in Grammar and
Discourse, 473-502. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Frajzyngier, Zygmunt & Robert Jasperson. 1991. That-clauses and other
complements. Lingua 83, 133- 153.
Givón, Talmy. 2009. The Genesis of Syntactic Complexity: Diachrony,
Ontogeny, Neuro-Cognition, Evolution. Amsterdam, Philadelphia:
Benjamins.
Grković-Major, Jasmina. 2021. The development of emotion predicate
complements in Serbian. In: Wiemer, Björn & Barbara Sonnenhauser
(eds.). Clausal Complementation in South Slavic, 415-441. Berlin,
Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Harris, Alice C. & Lyle Campbell. 1995. Historical Syntax in
Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Cambridge: CUP.
Haselow, Alexander & Sylvie Hancil. 2021. Grammar, discourse, and the
grammar-discourse interface. In: Haselow, Alexander & Sylvie Hancil
(eds.). Studies at the Grammar-Discourse-Interface. Discourse markers
and discourse-related grammatical phenomena, 1-20. Amsterdam,
Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Heine, Bernd. 2013. On discourse markers: grammaticalization,
pragmaticalization, or something else? Linguistics 51-6, 1205–1247.
Heine, Bernd & Tania Kuteva. 2007. The Genesis of Grammar: A
Reconstruction. Oxford: OUP.
Heine, Bernd, Gunther Kaltenböck, Tania Kuteva & Haiping Long. 2021.
The Rise of Discourse Markers. Cambridge: CUP.
Hopper, Paul J. & Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2003. Grammaticalization.
2nd edition. Cambridge: CUP.
Jespersen, Otto 1914. A modern English grammar on historical
principles. Part 3. Syntax. Vol. II. London, Kobenhavn: Allen and
Unwin – Munksgaard.
Letučij, Aleksandr B. 2021. Russkij jazyk o situacijax (konstrukcii s
sentencial’nymi aktantami) [The Russian language on situations
(constructions with clausal arguments)]. St. Petersburg: Aleteiija.
Long, Haiping & Chuanlin Deng. 2023. Do ‘say’-verbs really
grammaticalize into complementizers through clause combination:
Evidence from Chinese shuō ‘say’. Functions of Language 30-2, 137–158.
Long, Haiping, Xianhui Wang & Lei Wang. 2022. Formation of Modern
Chinese speech-quotative nǐ shuō ‘you say’ and attention-seeking nǐ
shuō ‘you say (it)’: Two grammaticalizational pathways. Language and
Linguistics 23-4, 744–777.
Long, Haiping, Fang Wu, Francesco Ursini & Zhijun Qin. 2021. On the
formation of a conjecturing clause-taking predicate in Modern Chinese:
A conjoining account of huaiyi. Functions of Language 28-2, 183–207.
Mazzola, Giulia. 2022. Syndetic and asyndetic complementation in
Spanish. A diachronic probabilistic account. Leuven: KU Leuven
Doctoral Dissertation.
Mendoza, Imke & Barbara Sonnenhauser. 2023. Oscillation and
Oscillating Structures in Syntax. Zeitschrift für Slawistik 68-2,
261–281.
Mendoza, Imke, Barbara Sonnenhauser & Björn Wiemer. 2024. Capturing an
oxymoron in the wild: Directive subordination in Slavic. Rivista di
Linguistica 36-2, 83-106. (special issue on Comparative approaches
towards the diachronic behavior of subordinate clauses, ed. by Iker
Salaberri, Annemarie Verkerk & Anne Wolfsgruber). DOI:
10.26346/1120-2726-224
Meyer, Roland, 2017. The C system of relatives and complement clauses
in the history of Slavic languages. Language 93-2, e97-e113.
DOI: 10.1353/lan.2017.0032
Miglio, Viola. 2010. Online databases and language change: the case of
Spanish dizque. In: Gries, Stefan Th., Stefanie Wulff & Mark Davies
(eds.). Corpus-linguistic applications: Current studies, new
directions, 7–28. Leiden: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789042028012
Rissanen, Matti 1991. On the history of that/zero in object clause
links in English. In: Aijmer, Karin & Bengt Altenberg (eds.). English
corpus linguistics: Studies in honour of Jan Svartvik, 272-289.
London: Longman.
Schmidtke-Bode, Karsten. 2009. A Typology of Purpose Clauses.
Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Schmidtke-Bode, Karsten. 2014. Complement Clauses and Complementation
Systems: A Cross-Linguistic Study of Grammatical Organization. Jena: U
Jena Postdoctoral Dissertation.
Schneider, Stefan. 2007. Reduced Parenthetical Clauses as Mitigators
(Studies in Corpus Linguistics). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.27.
Schneider, Stefan. 2018. Verbos cognitivos en el “Corpus del Nuevo
diccionario histórico” (CDH). Rilce. Revista de Filología Hispánica
34-3, 1081–1103. https://doi.org/10.15581/008.34.3.1081-103.
Serdobol’skaja, Natal’ja V. 2016. Javlenija sintaksičeskoj
nepodčinimosti v aktantnyx predloženijax s glagolom dumat’ [Phenomena
of syntactic non-subordinability in argument clauses with the verb
dumat’ ‘think’]. Trudy Instituta russkogo jazyka im. V.V. Vinogradova
[Works of the Vinogradov-Institute of the Russian Language], vyp. 10.
Moscow, 275–295.
Serdobol’skaja, Natal’ja V. 2018. Semantičeskie osobennosti
bessojuznoj konstrukcii pri glagole dumat’ v russkom jazyke [Semantic
peculiarities of the asyndetic construction with the verb dumat’
‘think’ in Russian]. Acta Linguistica Petropolitana / Trudy Instituta
lingvističeskix issledovanij 14-2, 656–684.
Sonnenhauser, Barbara. 2015. Functionalising syntactic variance:
declarative complementation with kako and če in 17th to 19th century
Balkan Slavic. Wiener slavistisches Jahrbuch. Neue Folge 3. 41–72.
Stassen, Leo. 1985. Comparison and Universal Grammar. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Teptiuk, Denys & Björn Wiemer (forthcoming). Reported Speech in
Ukrainian. In: Tatiana Nikitina, Stef Spronck, Denys Teptiuk & Anna
Bugaeva (eds.). Reported Speech: A comparative handbook. Berlin,
Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Thompson, Sandra A. & Anthony Mulac. 1991. The discourse conditions
for the use of the complementizer that in conversational English.
Journal of Pragmatics 15-3, 237–251.
https://doi.org/10.1016/0378-2166(91)90012-M.
Vázquez Rozas, Victoria. 2006. Construcción gramatical y valor
epistémico: el caso de “supongo.” In: Villayandre Llamazares, Milka
(ed.). Actas del XXXV Simposio Internacional de la Sociedad Española
de Lingüística, 1888–1900. León: Universidad de León, Departamento de
Filología Hispánica y Clásica.
https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=2377330.
Wiemer, Björn. 2021. A general template of clausal complementation and
its application to South Slavic: theoretical premises, typological
background, empirical issues. In: Wiemer, Björn & Barbara Sonnenhauser
(eds.). Clausal Complementation in South Slavic. Berlin, Boston: De
Gruyter Mouton, 29-159.
Wiemer, Björn. 2023a. Between analytical mood and clause-initial
particles – on the diagnostics of subordination for (emergent)
complementizers. Zeitschrift für Slawistik 68-2, 187-260.
Wiemer, Björn. 2023b. Clause-initial connectives, bound and unbound:
Indicators of mood, of subordination, or of something more
fundamental? Slavia Meridionalis 23 (Special issue: Comparative and
typological approaches to Slavic languages. Ed. by Jakub Banasiak,
Julia Mazurkiewicz-Sułkowska, Bożena Rozwadowska, Dorota
Klimek-Jankowska). DOI: 10.11649/sm.3194
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
********************** LINGUIST List Support ***********************
Please consider donating to the Linguist List, a U.S. 501(c)(3) not for profit organization:
https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=87C2AXTVC4PP8
LINGUIST List is supported by the following publishers:
Bloomsbury Publishing http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/
Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics
Cascadilla Press http://www.cascadilla.com/
De Gruyter Brill https://www.degruyterbrill.com/?changeLang=en
Edinburgh University Press http://www.edinburghuniversitypress.com
John Benjamins http://www.benjamins.com/
Language Science Press http://langsci-press.org
MIT Press http://mitpress.mit.edu/
Multilingual Matters http://www.multilingual-matters.com/
Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG http://www.narr.de/
Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT) http://www.lotpublications.nl/
Peter Lang AG http://www.peterlang.com
----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-36-2674
----------------------------------------------------------
More information about the LINGUIST
mailing list