Full Title: Marginal Grammar At The Semantics-Pragmatics Interface (Workshop At DGFS 2025)

Date: 05-Mar-2025 - 07-Mar-2025
Location: University of Mainz, Germany
Contact Person: Rita Finkbeiner
Meeting Email: [email protected]
Web Site: http://dgfs.uni-mainz.de

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Pragmatics; Semantics; Syntax

Call Deadline: 31-Aug-2024

Meeting Description:

Since the notion of marginal grammar (“Randgrammatik”) was first introduced by Fries (1987), the interest in infinite, verbless, insubordinate (Evans 2007), or otherwise “non-canonical” syntactic patterns with an own speech act potential – including notions such as “Minor clause types” (Siemund 2018), “Non-sentences” (Stainton 2004), and “Block language” (Aarts 2014) – has considerably increased, particularly within functional frameworks such as Construction Grammar (e.g., Lambrecht 1990, Kay & Fillmore 1999). A basic insight from functional approaches is that the particular grammatical properties of marginal syntactic patterns can be motivated by their specialized discoursal functions (e.g., Östman 2005, Auer 2010).

However, the guiding principles and the systematics behind these highly specific form-function correlations are still not fully understood. On the one hand, as marginal patterns often are syntactically reduced and semantically underdetermined, a great deal of their interpretation must reside in pragmatics. On the other hand, it is a matter of controversial debate which aspects of meaning belong to semantics and which to pragmatics (Finkbeiner 2019). From a semantics-pragmatics interface perspective, it is crucial to take into account not only conventional semantics and conversational pragmatics, but also borderline areas such as “truth-conditional pragmatics” (Recanati 2010) and “use-conditional semantics” (Gutzmann 2015) in order to comprehensively account for the form-function correlations in marginal constructions. However, there is a significant lack of comprehensive empirical work that both covers the broad variety of marginal phenomena in various languages and systematically relates them to specific kinds of interpretational processes at the semantics-pragmatics interface.

This workshop aims at filling this gap by encouraging and bringing together different strands of research on marginal phenomena across languages and discourse types. Relevant functional areas include, e.g., instructional, expressive, appellative, and regulative action types, usage manuals, public signs, internet memes, billboards, advertisements, headlines, exclamations, interjections, swearing, and many more.

Questions to be addressed at the workshop include, but are not limited to:
- Which particular marginal patterns, or minor clause types, can we distinguish in various languages, and how can we systematize them? What are their specific syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties?
- How are particular marginal patterns related to particular speech act types, discourse types, or genres? Are these relations conventional or context-dependent, or something in-between?
- Which different kinds of conventional and inferential meaning aspects, to be located within which (borderline) areas of the semantics/pragmatics interface, are involved in the interpretation of different marginal patterns?
- Which functional areas or activity types are especially prone to attract marginal patterns, which aren’t, and why? Which role do multimodal aspects play for the meaning constitution of marginal patterns?

Organization:
Rita Finkbeiner (University of Mainz, Germany)
Charlotte Eisenrauch (University of Mainz, Germany)

Invited Speaker: Peter Siemund (University of Hamburg)

Second Call for Papers:

We invite contributions on theoretical and empirical aspects of marginal grammar phenomena and the interpretational processes related to them, addressing any of the topics listed in the workshop description and beyond. Studies exploring new marginal patterns, testing new methodologies, or refining existing theoretical notions of meaning with respect to these patterns are very welcome, as are studies from the perspectives of multimodality, language change, language acquisition, contrastive linguistics, corpus linguistics, and experimental linguistics.

- Please submit your abstract by August 31, 2024 to [email protected]
- Abstracts should not exceed one page (DIN A4, 2.5 margins, 12pt font)
- Examples, graphics or references may appear on a second page

Important workshop information:
The workshop is part of the 47th annual meeting of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS 2025) to be hosted by Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, which will take place between 5-7 March 2025. Please note that the regulations of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) do not allow workshop participants to present two or more papers in different workshops (although their name can appear as a co-author of talk at another workshop). Participants must register for the DGfS conference and pay the conference fee. There are no additional fees for the workshop. For more information on the DGfS conference, see the conference website http://dgfs.uni-mainz.de.

Important dates:
Deadline for abstract submission: August 31, 2024
Notification of acceptance: September 2024
Workshop: March 5-7, 2025