Call for papers Pluractionality Leiden 26 Aug 2010

[Patricia Cabredo Hofherr]

Call for papers

Workshop on pluractionality: towards a typology of verbal plurality

26 August 2010, following on the 40th Colloquium on African Languages  
and Linguistics (CALL)
Leiden University Centre for Linguistics

Invited speaker: Sigrid Beck (Universität Tübingen)

Abstracts:
Anonymous 1 page abstracts must be submitted prior to 1 June 2010 by  
email to
CALL at hum.leidenuniv.nl; make sure you write your name, email address  
and affiliation in the
mail and mention ‘Workshop on pluractionality’ in the Subject line

Submission deadline: 1st June 2010
Notification of acceptance: 15 June 2010

In the descriptive literature the phenomenon of pluractionality has a  
long history even if not
necessarily under this label. Quite recently, there has also been an  
increase of interest in the
phenomenon in the formal semantic literature, especially since  
Lasersohn (1995). Researchers
have been looking not only at traditionally pluractional languages  
such as many Amerindian or
African languages, but also at languages such as Germanic or Romance  
where certain phenomena
and constructions – often traditionally analyzed as aspectual – have  
been analyzed as involving
pluractional operators (see for instance Van Geenhoven 2005). This  
raises the question of what
the limits of pluractionality are – what should be included and what  
is outside the domain of the
phenomenon. For that purpose, cooperation of descriptive and formal  
linguists is crucial as the
theoretical predictions of various approaches need to be compared with  
the empirical findings in
many different languages.
In this workshop we would like to bring together researchers working  
on pluractionality both in
traditional pluractional languages and on similar phenomena in  
languages that do not have
morphological marking of event plurality. The goal of this workshop is  
to increase the
understanding of various aspects of pluractionality. We are interested  
in talks discussing the
relation between the following formally different ways of encoding  
event plurality:
morphological pluractionality and event plurality marked by other  
means (e.g. by the use of
specific constructions). This kind of investigation necessarily leads  
to the relation between
pluractionality and aspect, as the so called pluractional  
constructions in “non-pluractional”
languages generally manifest only the temporal “flavor” of  
pluractionality (roughly
corresponding to the so called event number from Corbett 2000). It is  
clear that pluractionality
and aspect or aktionsart are closely related categories. However, the  
exact nature of the
connection remains elusive. In connection to that it is important to  
look at issues such as the
relation between temporal pluractionality (or, event number,  
potentially identical to certain
“aspects”) and participant-based pluractionality (or, participant  
number). Participant-based
pluractionality is not really comparable to aspect, although many  
languages do use a single
marker for both temporal and participant-based plurality. Apart from  
these inter-related issues,
the workshop is open to other contributions that will throw new light  
on pluractionality, e.g., the
specialization in meaning in the case of multiple pluractional markers  
in a language, comparison
of plurality in the nominal and verbal domains, or interaction of  
pluractional morphology with
other kinds of verbal morphology.

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