Full Title: Agency and Intentions in Language 5
Short Title: AIL5

Date: 29-Jan-2025 - 31-Jan-2025
Location: Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (virtual), Germany
Contact Person: Julie Goncharov
Meeting Email: [email protected]
Web Site: https://ail-workshop.github.io/AIL5-Workshop/index.html

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Linguistic Theories; Pragmatics; Semantics; Syntax

Call Deadline: 18-Dec-2024

Meeting Description:

Our sense of agency and ability to distinguish between intentional and accidental actions are fundamental for social interaction. They allow us to plan and perform joint actions and assign responsibility for our own actions and those of others. Research on the nature of agency and intentions has been very fruitful over the last few decades in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics. However, interdisciplinary discussion has rarely taken place.

We are delighted to announce the 5-th interdisciplinary workshop on Agency and Intentions in Language (AIL5). The goal of the workshop is to bring together scholars in linguistics, philosophy, and psychology interested in questions related to agency and intentions, broadly construed. Please consider submitting your work (see Call for Papers), or attending the workshop, to advance the scholarly understanding of ideas central to multiple academic disciplines.

AIL5 will take place online via Zoom. Links will be sent to registered participants and announced here. The workshop sessions will all be live and not recorded, so please make sure to save the dates to attend.

Invited speakers

Beth Levin (Stanford University)
David Lindeman (Georgetown University)
Prerna Nadathur (Ohio State University and New York University)

Call for Papers:

On the linguistic side, we welcome submissions examining any grammatical phenomena sensitive to the degree of agency or interpretation of an action as intentional versus accidental, such as controller choice, subjunctive obviation, licensing of polarity items, aspect choice in Slavic, case marking in ergative split languages and ‘out-of-control’ morphology. Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to, the following: ways in which natural languages manifest different degrees of agency or the distinction between intentional and accidental actions (morphological marking, syntactic structures, semantic denotations of verbs and adverbials, pragmatic and contextual differences); connections between agency, intentions, and event structure; relations between agency, intentions, and causation.

On the side of philosophy, we welcome submissions addressing any aspect related to philosophy of action, philosophy of mind, the nature of agency, intentions, and acting intentionally. Both theoretical and empirical research are welcome as they contribute to debates on various theories of action, free will, moral responsibility, nature of reasons, and practical rationality.

On the side of psychology, we welcome submissions that deal with agency, intentions, moral responsibility, and other related topics, broadly construed. Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to, the following: issues in developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, clinical psychology (the sense of agency in individuals with schizophrenia, OCD, etc.), and adults' perception of agency and responsibility.

Submissions

Anonymous abstracts, not exceeding 2 pages (including references and examples), with font no less than 11 Times New Roman, and 2 cm margins, should be uploaded on AIL5 OpenReview site https://openreview.net/group?id=AIL/2025/Workshop

If you are not registered on OpenReview, we recommend you use your institutional email for registration - in this case, your profile will be activated automatically. If you decide to use your non-institutional email, please allow two weeks for the profile to be activated.

We expect to notify authors of their acceptance in early January 2025. Presentations will be allotted 30 minute slots with 15 minutes for questions and discussion.