Workshop on the Semantic and Pragmatic Properties of (Non- )Restrictivity: program

[Fabienne Martin]

Semantic and Pragmatic Properties of (Non-)Restrictivity: program below

Date: 19-Mar-2012 - 20-Mar-2012
Location: Stuttgart, Germany
Contact Email: restrictivity at ims.uni-stuttgart.de
Meeting URL: http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/~arndt/restrictivity.html



Meeting Description:

Workshop on the Semantic and Pragmatic Properties of (Non-
)Restrictivity

Invited Speakers:

Artemis Alexiadou (Universität Stuttgart)
Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen (Universitetet i Oslo)
Jutta Hartmann (Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen)
Magdalena Kaufmann (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen)
Christopher Piñon (Université de Lille 3)
Paula Rubio Fernández (University College London)
Carla Umbach (Universität Osnabrück)
Bart Geurts (Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen)

Workshop Description:

Restrictivity - and its counterpart non-restrictivity - understood as
properties of natural language modifiers such as relative clauses,
adjectives, adverbials, PP- or nominal adjuncts, are fundamental
concepts in linguistic theory.

The question whether the modifier of a head is restrictive or not
depends on and has an influence on various linguistic levels. It is
reflected in syntax (pre- vs. postnominal modifier, attachment) and
prosody (accent placement, prosodic phrasing), and it is constrained
by semantic and pragmatic factors (concept type, information status,
information structure, entailment properties, projective meaning).

Despite the omnipresence of modification in natural discourse and
various attempts at defining (non-)restrictivity, there is still no
consensual definition which unites all structural and meaning-related
aspects, and which is robust enough to be used, for instance, in
corpus annotation.

Specific Questions:

i. Does the notion of (non-)restrictivity apply to modifiers in
indefinites in the same way as in definites? Why is it often difficult to
decide whether the modifier of an indefinite is restrictive or not?

ii. What difficulties arise when (non-)restrictivity applies in the non-
nominal domain, as with adverbials that modify events or states? What
is common and different between (non-)restrictive modifiers in the
verbal and the nominal domain?

iii. Restricting the denotation of a noun intuitively only makes sense if
its extension comprises more than one individual. Therefore,
restriction creates a set of alternatives. Is there an intrinsic connection
between restrictivity and focus?

iv. (Non-)restrictivity is often correlated with structural (syntactic)
differences. Is this generally the case or is it possible that sometimes
restrictive and non-restrictive phrases share the same structure?

v. What does information structure theory tell us about the prosody of
(non-)restrictive phrases?

vi. What are the connections and the differences between the
restrictivity of (in-)definite expressions and the restrictivity of other
quantifiers?

vii. It has been proposed that evaluative modifiers are less easily used
as restrictive modifiers than non-evaluative ones. Do modifiers more
generally display a lexical bias for either a restrictive or a non-
restrictive reading, and if yes, what are the properties responsible for
those kinds of bias?

Workshop organized by Fabienne Martin (Institut für
Linguistik/Romanistik, SFB 732-B5, 'Polysemy in a Conceptual System')
and Arndt Riester (Institut für Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung, SFB
732-A1, 'Incremental Specification of Focus and Givenness in a
Discourse Context') at the University of Stuttgart.

Venue: University of Stuttgart, Keplerstr. 17 (K II building, room 17.16)

Monday, March 19, 2012

10:00
Registration

10:30
Paula Rubio Fernández (University College London) & Bart Geurts
(Nijmegen): Redundant Colour Adjectives in Object Requests

11:15
Coffee

11:45
Carla Umbach (Stuttgart/Osnabrück): Nonrestrictive Modification and
Evaluativity

12:30
Lunch

14:00
Timothy Leffel (New York University): Nonrestrictive Adjectives and
theTheory of Scalar Implicatures

14:45
Artemis Alexiadou (Stuttgart): On the Syntactic Reality of Restrictive
Adjectival Modification

15:30
Coffee

16:00
Arndt Riester (Stuttgart): To Restrict is to Focus

16:45
Cécile Meier (Frankfurt): Swiss German Relative Clauses

17:30
End

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

9:30
Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen (Oslo): (Non)Restrictiveness from a
Discourse Perspective

10:15
Coffee

10:45
Katsuhiko Yabushita (Naruto University): ''Nonrestrictive'' Universal
Quantifier: the Case of Japanese Dare-mó

11:30
Magdalena Kaufmann (Göttingen): t.b.a.

12:15
Lunch

13:45
Jutta Hartmann (Tübingen): (Non)Restrictivity in It-cleft Sentences

14:30
Christopher Piñón (Lille): t.b.a.

15:15
End


To register for this event, please send an email to:
restrictivity at ims.uni-stuttgart.de

Registration fee EUR 40 (Students EUR 20) to be paid on site.
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