37.185, Confs: Polar Questions Across Languages (Germany)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-185. Thu Jan 15 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.185, Confs: Polar Questions Across Languages (Germany)

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Date: 14-Jan-2026
From: Ateş Çalışır [atescalisir at gmail.com]
Subject: Polar Questions Across Languages


Polar Questions Across Languages
Short Title: POQAL-3

Date: 29-Apr-2026 - 30-Apr-2026
Location: Göttingen, Germany
Contact Email: atescalisir at gmail.com
Meeting URL: https://tinyurl.com/mrx34jbc

Linguistic Field(s): Phonology; Pragmatics; Semantics; Syntax;
Typology

Submission Deadline: 20-Feb-2026

After the success of our initial two workshops focused on meaning and
form, we are excited to launch a third POQAL meeting, this time
without subject limitations. We hope to welcome your research on
polar(-like) questions, especially in lesser studied languages and
dimensions of form and meaning. As before, the aim is to discuss the
phenomenon across subdisciplines and we will do everything we can to
curate a program to facilitate the inclusion of a diversity of
approaches. Join us in Göttingen this spring!  How is polar question
meaning best analyzed with respect to other question types? What is
the range of non-canonical questions and what do these say about the
meaning and respresentation of polar questions? How to best handle
bias and other inferences? How are polar questions expressed in
syntax, morphology, intonation? How do components of the grammar of
each language constrain and determine these ways, e.g., in the
inventory of functional categories, the expression of negation, focus,
polarity, intonational characteristics, pragmatic division of labor
among forms?  How do fine grammatical components correlate with fine
components of meaning? What crosslinguistic generalizations can be
made in this new level of granularity?
The last decades have seen a steady increase in work on meaning of
polar questions, with relatively new notions like bias becoming front
and center. The empirical scope has also extended, to include not only
plain interrogatives but also declaratives, question tags, and
alternative questions. These forms raise important questions about the
relationship between form and meaning, as the so-called non-canonical
forms induce finer components of meaning like bias.
Beyond these polar-like question forms familiar from widely studied
languages, various other lexical and structural means are deployed to
form paradigms of polar-like questions across languages. These include
various particles, forms related to embedding, negation and focus. It
is sometimes not clear how canonicality applies to these paradigms,
yet different forms relate to different components of complex polar
question meaning. Proposals have been made that the syntax and prosody
of polar questions hold a discrete complexity, with dedicated
components spelling out pieces of the question act.
This workshop aims to bring together work that continues this line of
research by looking closely into expression strategies of polar
questions. We invite abstracts that formally address aspects of
polar(-like) question forms across languages, and theorize on polar
question form and its relation to meaning based on a wide range of
data of forms as well as languages. We are particularly excited to
hear about analyses of fine components of meaning, formal grammatical
phenomena such as clausal structure, embedding, negation, focus and
intonation, the relationship of these phenomena to fine components of
meaning, descriptive work on novel formal and pragmatic phenomena in
lesser studied languages, and emerging crosslinguistic generalizations
at this level of analysis.
Please limit abstracts of max. 2 pages to two abstracts per
(co-)author and send to poqal.workshop at proton.me.
Invited Speakers:
Natasha Korotkova (University College Utrecht)
Kyle Rawlins (Johns Hopkins University)
Sophie Repp (University of Cologne)
Maribel Romero (University of Konstanz)
Important Dates:
Abstracts due: February 20, 2026
Decisions announced: February 28, 2026
WS Date: April 29-30, 2026
WS location: University of Göttingen, Historische Sternwarte
(Historical Observatory) https://lageplan.uni-goettingen.de?piz=8420
Website: https://tinyurl.com/mrx34jbc
Contact persons: Ateş Çalışır, Beste Kamali (poqal.workshop at proton.me)
Previous editions: https://sites.google.com/view/poqal-amsterdam/home,
https://sites.google.com/view/poqal-2/home
This workshop series was originally conceived and sponsored under the
Marie Skłodowska Curie fellowship EPOQ-101067203 granted to Beste
Kamali.



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