LINGUIST List 15.2353

Sat Aug 21 2004

Calls: Pragmatics/Germany; Ling Theories/Netherlands

Editor for this issue: Amy Wronkowicz <amylinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. egg, The (In-)Determinacy of Meaning - Issues in Formal Pragmatics
2. n.elouazizi, The Structure of the Verb Phrase in Afroasiatic: Morpho-Phonological and Syntactic Approaches

The (In-)Determinacy of Meaning - Issues in Formal Pragmatics 

Date: 23-Feb-2005 - 25-Feb-2005
Location: Cologne, Germany
Contact: Regine Eckardt
Contact Email: eckardtzas.gwz-berlin.de 

Linguistic Sub-field: Pragmatics, Semantics 

Call Deadline: 01-Sep-2004

Meeting Description:

The (In-)Determinacy of meaning - Issues in Formal Pragmatics
 
Organisers: Regine Eckardt (ZAS Berlin), Markus Egg (Universit�t des
Saarlandes)

Invited Speaker: Chris Potts (University of Massachusetts at Amherst)

Date: February 23-25, 2005.

SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS

We are pleased to announce the following Workshop, to take place from
February 23rd to 25th 2005 at the University of Cologne, as part of
the Annual Meeting of the DGfS (German Linguistic Society).

 The (In-)Determinacy of Meaning

 Issues in Formal Pragmatics

Organisers:
Regine Eckardt (ZAS Berlin)
Markus Egg (Universit�t des Saarlandes)

Invited Speaker: Chris Potts (University of Massachusetts at Amherst)
 
Call For Papers

Formal investigations in semantics and pragmatics have converged in
the last decade from competing to interacting modes of interpretation
in natural language. Current semantic investigations acknowledge, and
take advantage of, the powerful interpretative mechanisms that enrich
literal but not yet fully specified - sentence meaning by
contextualisation, anchoring in discourse, presupposition
projection and accommodation, and pragmatic inferencing. As a result,
we witness how lean literal meanings can convey rich information in
context. On the pragmatic side, a broad range of recent approaches
achieve high standards of formalisation and thus make possible novel
insights and investigations into the semantics-pragmatics
interface. Due to these advances, there is a new surge of interest in
notoriously evasive issues such as the pragmatics of speech acts,
questioning and dialogue, discourse oriented parts of speech, or
computational models of pragmatics.

The workshop aims to reflect the broad range of formal investigations
in pragmatics, and to demonstrate the power of approaches that take
advantage of semantic plus pragmatic information in an integrated or
closely connected interpretation process. We specifically encourage
contributions that apply formal pragmatics to new linguistic
domains. The scope of the workshop includes, but is not limited to

* pragmatic issues in questions and dialogue
* approaches to pragmatic reasoning in computational linguistics
* the interaction of pragmatic inferencing with semantic composition
* underspecification and contextual specification
* the pragmatics of discourse particles and utterance/discourse
oriented adverbials
* issues in Bidirectional Optimality Theory and related theories
* formal pragmatic accounts in language history and variation
* issues in Neo-Gricean pragmatics

Important dates:

Deadline for submission of abstracts: September 1, 04

Notification of acceptance: October 1, 04

Conference (as part of the Annual Meeting of the DGfS 2005): February
23-25, 2005.

We invite the submission of anonymous abstracts of maximally 1000
words, including examples and references. Presentations will be 30
min. plus time for discussion. Electronic submission (Word or .pdf) is
strongly preferred. Please send abstracts to

Regine Eckardt
Zentrum fuer Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) Berlin
Jaegerstr. 10/11
D-10117 Berlin
electronic submissions to: eckardtzas.gwz-berlin.de

The Structure of the Verb Phrase in Afroasiatic: Morpho-Phonological
and Syntactic Approaches

Date: 14-Jan-2005 - 16-Jan-2005 
Location: Leiden, Netherlands 
Contact: Noureddine Elouazizi 
Contact Email: n.elouazizilet.leidenuniv.nl
Meeting URL:
http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/ulcl/afroasiatic-vp/templates/mainpage.dwt

Linguistic Sub-field: Linguistic Theories 
Call Deadline: 20-Sep-2004 

Meeting Description:

THEME DESCRIPTION
The Afroasiatic languages of Africa and the Middle East have a rich
morphology for verbal derivation and inflection. Unlike the basically
affixal morphological systems of Indo-European languages, Afroasiatic
morphology is pervaded by a wide variety of purely morphological
alternations that are internal to the stem. In Classical Arabic, for
instance, there is a clear sense in which verbs and nouns like kataba
'he wrote', kaataba 'he corresponded', and kitaabun 'book' are
morphologically related to one another by means of the consonantal
structure of the root, although they do not share discrete strings of
segments in concatenated morphemes. In comprising three discontinuous
morphological components (the root, the stem template, and the vowel
melody) the verb phrase structure in Afroasiatic is radically
different from the one in Indo-European languages.

The study of the root and pattern dichotomy goes back as early as the
traditional treatments of medieval Arab and Hebrew grammarians. Within
the generative research tradition, research on these
morpho-phonological aspects started with McCarthy's (1979)
seminal work. Recent advances within the framework of government
phonology have shown that the stem template itself has internal
structure. Furthermore, verbal derivation follows a systematic and
hence predictable apophonic path (Guerssel and Lowenstam 1986;
S�g�ral 1986, 2000; Bendjaballah 1999, 2001). For the purely
syntactic aspect, root-and-pattern morphology poses a challenge, since
the basic morphological units do not correspond in any way to distinct
syntactic positions.

TOPICS
The purpose of this interdisciplinary symposium is to provide a
meeting ground for experts to exchange views and findings on a central
topic of comparative and theoretical Afroasiatic linguistics. Within
the general theme of verbal configurational structure in Afroasiatic
languages, the following questions are of particular interest to the
meeting:

- What is the internal structure of the VP/vP? Given the inflectional
role of the vowels, how does the structure of the verb relate to the
tense/aspect domain?
- How much internal structure is present in templatic morphology and
what is its relation to the derivation of VPs? In which respect does
apophony reflect syntactic derivation?
- What is the status of stem pattern/binyanim that encode grammatical
voice alternations (causative, middle, reciprocal) and situation
aspect (stative, inchoative)? Are they listed in the lexicon together
with a root entry (Borer 2004) or are they associated with distinct
voice heads (Doron 2003).
- What is the position of the subject? Can subjects be licensed within
the vP or is subject raising obligatory?
- What are the mirco- and macroparameters of crosslinguistic variation
in the verbal domain?

INVITED SPEAKERS

Edit Doron (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Jean Lowenstamm (CNRS - Universit� 7, Paris)
Ur Shlonsky (Universit� de Gen�ve) 
Jacqueline Lecarme (CNRS - Universit� 7, Paris)
Jamal Ouhalla (University College Dublin)
Sabrina Bendjaballah (CNRS, Universit� Lille III) 

SUBMISSION DETAILS
Abstracts are invited for 30-minute talks (plus 10 minutes of
discussion). Abstracts should be anonymous and limited to one page
(using 1" margins on all sides with at least 11pt font size) with an
additional page containing data and references. Non-standard fonts
should be avoided. In case used, they should be embedded in a
pdf-document. Submissions are limited to a maximum of one individual
and one joint abstract per author.

The abstracts should be sent by e-mail to both of the following email
addresses: n.elouazizilet.leidenuniv.nl and
C.H.Reintgeslet.leidenuniv.nl

All abstracts should be submitted as attachments and the body message
includes the following information: title of the paper, author's
name(s), affiliation, phone and email address.

Abstracts will be selected on a competitive basis after a review by a
reviewing committee. All authors who will be selected to present their
work at the conference will be invited to submit their papers for a
volume publication.

IMPORTANT DATES TO REMEMBER
- September 20th, 2004 		Deadline to submit the abstracts 
- September 29th, 2004	 Notifications of Acceptance 
- November 19th, 2004 Early Registration deadline
- January 14th-16th, 2005	Conference dates 

REGISTRATION INFORMATION
All attendees, including speakers, are expected to register for the
meeting.

Should you have any other questions or comments, please check at
http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/ulcl/afroasiatic-vp/templates/mainpage.dwt
Or feel free to contact the organizers.