Full Title: On the Variation of Adverbial Clauses

Date: 05-Oct-2023 - 06-Oct-2023
Location: Göttingen, Germany
Contact Person: Łukasz Jędrzejowski
Meeting Email: [email protected]
Web Site: http://www.lukasz-jedrzejowski.eu/adverbial-clauses-2/

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

Call Deadline: 25-Aug-2023

Meeting Description:

The different types of subordinate clauses – i.e. complement, relative, and adverbial clauses – differ not only in their internal structure, but also in how they attach to the main clause, and in particular, in how many subtypes they have. Adverbial clauses are particularly interesting in this respect. Causal clauses, for instance, are normally introduced by several complementizers in a single language (cf. 'because', 'since', 'for' in English) and operate on the content, epistemic and speech act level (van Dijk 1977, Sweetser 1990, Frey 2016), giving rise to striking variation, lexical restrictions attributed to the individual complementizers, and their (non-)at-issue status (Antomo 2012, Scheffler 2008, 2013, Charnavel 2018, 2020, Liu 2021). The main goal of this conference is to investigate the diversity of adverbial clauses from a synchronic and diachronic point of view.

Recent work focuses on the syntax-prosody mapping, surveying several significant syntactic distinctions such as root – embedded, complement – subject – adverbial, in-situ – derived on the one hand, and their alignment to intonational phrases on the other, where distinctions like left – right play one crucial role (cf. Hamlaoui & Szendrői accepted). Hamlaoui & Szendrői likewise point out that pragmatic notions like Speech Act and information structural ones like topic appear to exhibit characteristic mappings to prosody, sometimes leading to a “lack of isomorphy between syntax and phonology” (p. 43) (cf. also Schenner & Sode 2004 on causal clauses mentioned above). If so, a complex network of orthogonal though related notions suggests itself at the syntax-phonology interface.

The main aim of this conference is to bring together recent theoretical investigations on adverbial clauses and contribute to a better understanding of their synchronic and diachronic variation. Due to the rich inventory of adverbial clauses, we furthermore hope to gain novel theoretical insights into how sentential adjuncts can be derived.

The main conference will be preceded by a one-day thematic workshop. In 2023, we will revisit the theme of adverbial clauses in creole and pidgin languages.

The international conference “On the variation of adverbial clauses” is the third meeting of the scientific network “Adverbial clauses and subordinate dependency relationships” founded by German Science Foundation granted to Łukasz Jędrzejowski (grant number 455700544). The conference will be hosted by the ‘Seminar für Deutsche Philologie’ at the University of Göttingen, on October 5–6, 2023, and is co-organized by Mailin Antomo, Andreas Blümel, Marco Coniglio and Łukasz Jędrzejowski.

Call for Papers:

We invite submission of abstracts for 40-minute oral presentations (with additional 20 minutes for questions) on topics that address variation of adverbial clauses. These may include case studies, studies of trends, corpus results, as well as formal theories of particular adverbial clause types. We also welcome research at the interfaces with semantics and other areas, as long as the research makes a contribution to the area of adverbial clauses. Preference will be given to theoretically oriented papers and novel case studies.

We also invite abstracts for the pre-workshop on adverbial clauses in creole and pidgin languages.

A full call for papers is available via the link below:

http://www.lukasz-jedrzejowski.eu/Netzwerk/CfP-variation-Goettingen.pdf

Please submit abstracts to [email protected] no later than August 25, 2023.

Notification: September 1, 2023

For inquiries, please send an e-mail to [email protected]