2nd CFP: Questions in Discourse (Frankfurt, March 7-9, 2012)

[Floris Roelofsen]

*Questions in Discourse*

Hosted by the Deutsch Gemeinschaft fur Sprachwissenschaft
March 7-9, 2012, Frankfurt am Main
Submission deadline:  *August 15, 2011*

*Website*
https://sites.google.com/site/inquisitivesemantics/workshops/questions-in-discourse-2012

*Invited speakers*
David Beaver
Jeroen Groenendijk
Malte Zimmermann

*Call for papers*
The proposed workshop focuses on the interaction of form and meaning of
linguistic expressions with questions in discourse. It is well known that
such an interaction exists, for instance, focus in an answer often
corresponds to the wh-word in an explicit or implicit question, and some
verbs can even embed overt or concealed questions. Recently, however,
important progress has been achieved in this regard.

On the one hand, it has been shown that questions, in particular the
question under discussion, affects the interpretation of natural language
utterances more deeply than previously assumed, for instance, the
interpretation of discourse particles seem to strongly depend on the
question under discussion (Beaver & Clark 2008) and even classical phenomena
such as presupposition projection have recently been argued to depend on the
question under discussion in a substantial way (Simons et al 2010).

On the other hand, recent developments in Inquisitive Semantics (Groenendijk
& Roelofsen 2009) suggests that the class of natural language expressions
that give rise to alternatives and invite the hearer to choose between these
alternative includes not only questions but also all kinds of expressions
related to disjunction and indefinites. This gives a new perspective on the
meaning of natural language expressions in general as suggesting one or more
potential updates of the common ground, and it gives rise to new tools in
pragmatics e.g. for the computation of quantity implicatures and the
grammatical structure of answers.
We invite theoretical papers or case studies that discuss the ways in which
questions can be captured in a discourse model, the interaction of questions
with the interpretation of other expressions, and the inquisitive nature of
disjunctive, indefinite, and interrogative constructions.

*Instructions for authors*
Authors can submit anonymous abstracts of at most 250 words via easychair.

*Important dates*
Submission deadline:  August 15, 2011
Notification: September 15, 2011
Conference: March 7-9, 2012

*Organizers*
Edgar Onea
Floris Roelofsen
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