Full Title: Modality and Its Interfaces With Aspectuality, Temporality and Epistemicity (in Germanic and Beyond)

Date: 05-Jun-2025 - 06-Jun-2025
Location: Paris, France
Contact Person: Pierre-Yves Modicom
Meeting Email: [email protected]

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Linguistic Theories; Semantics
Language Family(ies): Germanic

Call Deadline: 01-Dec-2024

Meeting Description:

The informal International Working Group Modalität im Deutschen was founded in 1992. Eleven meetings have been held since then, with the focus of the conference gradually expanding to all Germanic languages and to contrastive perspectives, especially within the Germanic family and between German and other languages. The relationship between epistemic modality and evidentiality, which are now often grouped into one macro-category of epistemicity, has become a recurring topic. The same holds for the interface of modality with aspectuality and temporality.

The 12th meeting of the working group will take place in Paris, at Sorbonne University, on June 5th-6th, 2025.

Call for Papers:

Talks will last 20 to 25 minutes and will be followed by a discussion.

Abstracts should be between 1 and 2 pages long and should be submitted on or before December 1st, 2024, by an e-mail to: pierre-yves.modicom(AT)univ-lyon3.fr and olivier-duplatre(AT)wanadoo.fr

Working languages : English and German

The conference is open to any submission dealing with one of the domains listed below, either from a contrastive perspective involving a Germanic variety, or from the point of view of Germanic linguistics per se. Contributions dealing with lesser-described or non-standard languages and varieties are especially welcome.

Selected topics:
- The taxonomy of modal meanings, the subdivision of root modality and the relationship between root and epistemic modality.
- The merits and limits of quantificational views on modality (e.g. in possible worlds semantics) and the use of the concepts of possibility and necessity as semantic primaries for the depiction of modality, in contrast with traditions using the concept of modality as a cover term for all kinds of propositional attitudes.
- Grammaticalization into and out of the domain of modality. This includes, for instance, post-modal meanings such as diachronically secondary uses as temporal or aspectual auxiliaries, or specialized illocutionary values (e.g. in concessive contexts), but also grammaticalization into the modal domain (e.g. GET verbs turning into permissive modals)
- Secondary modal interpretations of non-modal expressions, especially in the aspectual-temporal domain.
- Modality and negation, modality and polarity.
- Epistemic modality and its scope : non-propositional epistemicity, the interaction between epistemics and sentence-mood, epistemicity as illocutionary modification (or speech act specification), epistemicity as a circumstance.
- Epistemic modality and speaker-orientation : logophoricity vs egophoricity, interactional views on epistemicity, epistemicity as deixis

Formal phenomena (indicative list):
- Modal verbs
- Modal modifiers (adverbs or adjectives)
- Modal discourse markers
- Grammatical or semi-grammatical modal items (mood markers, particles)