LINGUIST List 19.1944
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Thu Jun 19 2008
Calls: General Ling/Germany; General Ling/Netherlands
Editor for this issue: F. Okki Kurniawan
<okki linguistlist.org>
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Directory
1. Edgar
Onea,
Focus Marking Strategies and Focus Interpretation
2. Petra
Sleeman,
Variation and Change in the Romance and Germanic NP/DP
Message 1: Focus Marking Strategies and Focus Interpretation
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Date: 16-Jun-2008
From: Edgar Onea <edgar.onealing.uni-stuttgart.de>
Subject: Focus Marking Strategies and Focus Interpretation
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Full Title: Focus Marking Strategies and Focus Interpretation
Date: 04-Mar-2009 - 06-Mar-2009
Location: Osnabrueck, Germany
Contact Person: Edgar Onea
Meeting Email: edgar.onealing.uni-stuttgart.de
Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Pragmatics; Semantics; Typology
Call Deadline: 01-Aug-2008
Meeting Description:
Workshop on 'Focus Marking Strategies and Focus Interpretation' as part of the
31st Annual Meeting of the German Linguistics Society (DGfS 2009), hosted by the
University of Osnabrueck/Germany.
Call for Papers
Focus Marking Strategies and Focus Interpretation
The necessity of a strict distinction between focus as a category of information
structure related to the presence of alternatives in the interpretation context
and focus marking as the grammati-cal coding of focus is widely discussed in the
literature (Krifka 2007). Different focus marking strategies may, however, have
different effects on the interpretation of focus. A well-known example is
Hungarian, in which in-situ and ex-situ focus differ with regard to exhaustivity
and contrast (É.Kiss 1998). Similar findings have been reported on Finnish,
Turk-ish etc. Such findings support the hypothesis that focus interpretation
depends on the marking strategy in languages with several strategies of focus
marking at their disposal. However, re-search on other languages suggests that
this hypothesis may not hold universally. In Hausa (Chadic), for instance, any
interpretation available for ex-situ focus is also available for in-situ focus
(Hartmann & Zimmermann 2007). Moreover, even for Hungarian it has been argued
that the semantic difference between in-situ and ex-situ focus is related to a
specific syntactic posi-tion in the left periphery that may actually be
independent of focus (Horváth 2007).
These observations give rise to the following questions:
(i.) Can a general notion of focus as an underspecified information structural
category (often associated with prosodic prominence) with a unified semantic
interpretation mechanism in terms of alternatives (e.g. Rooth 1992) be
maintained? I.e., can we derive the differ-ences in meaning that are observable
with different strategies of focus marking from the different grammatical
structure of the respective sentences plus pragmatic principles?
or
(ii.) Do we need more fine-grained notions of information structure, such as
e.g. contrast, exhaustivity, newness, that divide the more general notion of
focus into subclasses, such that languages would use different marking
strategies for expressing them?
The workshop invites syntactic, semantic and typological work on different
strategies of focus marking and focus interpretation. In addition, we would also
encourage the presentation of diachronic data related to the evolution of
different strategies of focus marking. The work-shop is of interest for
researchers working on linguistic interfaces. We are looking forward to
applications that provide data on and analyses of the effects of structural
encoding on the se-mantic and/or pragmatic interpretation.
Invited speakers:
Daniel Büring (UCLA/ Los Angeles), (confirmed)
Daniel Wedgwood (University of Edinburgh), (confirmed)
Ad Neeleman(UCL/ London), (not confirmed)
Submission:
Abstracts should be sent by e-mail no later than 1 August 2008 to the following
address:
edgar.onealing.uni-stuttgart.de
The e-mail should use the subject header ''Abstract DGfS 2009''
Abstract Guidelines:
The abstract should be attached as a PDF file. Anonymous abstracts should not
exceed one page (12pt font, 1'' margins), with one or more additional pages for
examples and references. Please include the following information in the body of
the e-mail:
(a) Title of the paper
(b) Name of the author(s)
(c) Affiliation(s)
(d) E-mail address(es)
Important Dates:
1 August 2008: Abstract submission
15 September 2008: Notification of acceptance or rejection
30 November 2008: Submission of 1-page abstract for conference booklet
4-6 March 2009: Workshop
Workshop Organizers:
Andreas Haida, Humboldt University/ Berlin
Edgar Onea, Stuttgart University
Malte Zimmermann, Potsdam University
Contact:
edgar.onealing.uni-stuttgart.de
Literature
É. Kiss, K. 1998. Identificational focus versus information focus, Language
74(2), 245-273.
Horváth, Julia 2007. Separating "Focus movement'' from Focus, in: Simin Karimi
et al., eds. Phrasal and Clausal Architecture, John Benjamins.
Hartmann, K. & M. Zimmermann. 2007. In Place - Out of Place? Focus in Hausa. In
K. Schwabe & S. Winkler (Hgg.), On Information Structure, Meaning and Form:
Gener-alizing Across Languages. Benjamins, Amsterdam: 365-403
Krifka, M. 2007. Basic notions of information structure. In Féry, C, Fanselow,
G. & Krifka, M. (Eds.), Working Papers of the SFB632, Interdisciplinary Studies
on Information Struc-ture (ISIS) 6. Potsdam: Universitätsverlag, 13-56.
Rooth, M. 1992. A Theory of Focus Interpretation. Natural Language Semantics
1,75- 116.
Message 2: Variation and Change in the Romance and Germanic NP/DP
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Date: 13-Jun-2008
From: Petra Sleeman <p.sleemanuva.nl>
Subject: Variation and Change in the Romance and Germanic NP/DP
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Full Title: Variation and Change in the Romance and Germanic NP/DP
Short Title: Variation and Change
Date: 28-Jan-2009 - 30-Jan-2009
Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands
Contact Person: Petra Sleeman
Meeting Email: variation-change-fgwuva.nl
Web Site: http://www.hum.uva.nl/variation-and-change
Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Historical Linguistics
Language Family(ies): Germanic; Romance
Call Deadline: 01-Nov-2008
Meeting Description:
One of the main aims of this conference is to shed some light on the question of
what is similar and what is different in the structure of the noun phrase of the
various Romance and Germanic languages and dialects, and what causes this
similarity or difference.
Call for Papers
Variation and change in the structure of the noun phrase in Germanic and
Romance: autonomous developments or result of language contact?
28 January - 30 January, 2009
Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam (ACLC)
One of the recurrent questions in historical linguistics is to what extent
languages can borrow grammar from other languages. It seems for instance hardly
likely that each ''average European'' language developed a definite article all
by itself, without any influence from neighbouring languages. It is, on the
other hand, by no means clear what exactly was borrowed, since the way in which
definiteness is expressed differs greatly among the various Germanic and Romance
languages and dialects.
Topics to be discussed at the conference might include (but are not limited to)
the following:
- the emergence of the articles and the origin of the category of definiteness
- changes/variation in word order, e.g. in the position of determiners and
adjectives
- changes/variation in the structure and position of possessives
- changes/variation in agreement patterns within the DP/NP
- the rise (and death) of the nominalized infinitive and other nominalizations
- changes/variation in structure and position of (reduced) relative clauses
Invited Speakers:
Norbert Corver (Universiteit Utrecht)
Östen Dahl (Stockholms Universitet)
Giuseppe Longobardi (Università degli Studi di Trieste)
Abstracts are invited for 30 minute talks (20'+10') relevant to the conference
theme. Submissions are limited to one single-authored and one joint-authored
abstract. The abstracts should be sent by e-mail to variation-change-fgwuva.nl
no later than 1 November 2008.
Abstracts should be anonymous both in the body of the text and the filename and
should not exceed two A4 pages with a 2.5cm margin on each side and in 12 pt
font. A second document (in a separate file) should be submitted with the title
of your paper and name(s), affiliation(s), and preferred contact details of the
author(s).
Submission Deadline: November 1, 2008.
Notification of acceptance: December 1, 2008.
Organizing committee: Harry Perridon, Josep Quer, Petra Sleeman & Fred Weerman.
Submission address: variation-change-fgwuva.nl
Website: http://www.hum.uva.nl/variation-and-change
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