37.2393, Confs: Workshop at DGfS 2027: Theoretical and Empirical Approaches to Scalarity (Germany)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-2393. Fri Jul 17 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.2393, Confs: Workshop at DGfS 2027: Theoretical and Empirical Approaches to Scalarity (Germany)

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Date: 15-Jul-2026
From: Alexander Wimmer [alexander.wimmer at ling.uni-stuttgart.de]
Subject: Workshop at DGfS 2027: Theoretical and Empirical Approaches to Scalarity


Workshop at DGfS 2027: Theoretical and Empirical Approaches to
Scalarity

Date: 03-Mar-2027 - 05-Mar-2027
Location: Jena, Germany
Contact Email: syssi2025 at gmail.com

Linguistic Field(s): Pragmatics; Semantics; Syntax

Submission Deadline: 31-Aug-2026

Scalar focus particles (ScalFocPs) like ‘even’ and ‘only’ have played
a central role in alternative semantics and related fields ever since
their development (Jacobs 1983, Rooth 1985, 1992). Their syntax and
semantics have been at the center of much recent work on languages
other than commonly studied varieties of English (cf. Hole 2013, Sun
2020 on Vietnamese; Quek & Hirsch 2017 on Singaporean English; Hole
2017, 2023, Wimmer 2020, 2022, Yuan 2024 on Chinese; Yip 2024, 2026 on
Cantonese, Vietnamese and Yorùbá; Aremu 2025 on Kasem, Kusaal and
Yorùbá). Exclusive ScalFocPs like ‘just’ pose at least two
compositionality problems. First, they may receive so-called minimal
sufficiency (MS) readings:
(1) Just the THOUGHT of food makes me hungry. (Coppock & Beaver 2014)
Under (1)’s MS-reading, which is crucially non-exclusive, as little as
the thought of food makes the speaker hungry, not to mention more
direct exposure to food. The compositional semantics of MS continues
to be under debate (Grosz 2012, Coppock & {Beaver, Lindahl} 2014,
Panizza & Sudo 2020, Wimmer 2022; cf. also Mingming Liu 2016, 2017 on
exclusive vs. nonexclusive 'jiu' in Chinese).
A second issue is the syntactic disentanglement of ScalFocPs across
languages. Chinese exhibits heavy particle doubling (Hole 2004, 2006,
2017, 2023, Sun 2021, Liao & Jheng 2025): the proposition that Old
Wang drank tea and nothing else can be expressed as ‘OW only1 teaF
only2 drink’. It is not settled whether the two ONLYs just
syntactically agree with each other, or whether each makes a semantic
contribution of its own, e.g. an exclusive vs. a scalar contribution
(Hole 2015, 2017).
Our workshop aims to bring together the latest approaches to the above
issues and beyond. It is the second installment in a workshop series
connected to the DFG-funded project “Scalarity at the Syntax-Semantics
Interface” (SYSSI), at the University of Stuttgart. It will be one in
a variety of workshops at the 49th Annual meeting of the German
Linguistic Society (DGfS 2027), to be held from March 3 to 5, 2027, at
the Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena.
The invited speakers include:
- Yael Greenberg (Bar-Ilan University)
- Magdalena Kaufmann (University of Connecticut)
- Mingming Liu (Tsinghua University Beijing)
We welcome abstracts addressing puzzles including, but not limited to,
the following topics:
- the building blocks of scalarity: e.g., the syntactic distribution
and compositional interaction of different operators to yield an
overall ScalFocP meaning
- empirical approaches to scalarity: psycholinguistics, fieldwork,
especially on understudied languages
- the compositional semantics of MS-constructions
- the contribution of ScalFocPs to various constructions, including
conditionals.
Abstracts should not exceed two pages, excluding references, and be
sent as PDFs to the following address: syssi2025 at gmail.com. The
submission deadline is August 31, 2026.
Please note that workshop attendants need to sign up for the DGfS 2027
as a whole. Here is the link to the preliminary website:
https://www.gw.uni-jena.de/en/101200/dgfs-2027.
Daniel Hole, Alexander Wimmer & Peng Liu
Institut für Linguistik/Germanistik
Stuttgart, Germany



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