Full Title: Workshop on the Syntax and Semantics of Scalarity
Short Title: SYSSI

Date: 03-Mar-2025 - 04-Mar-2025
Location: Stuttgart, Germany
Contact Person: Alexander Wimmer
Meeting Email: [email protected]

Linguistic Field(s): Pragmatics; Semantics; Syntax

Call Deadline: 10-Jan-2025

Meeting Description:

The DFG-project "Scalarity at the Syntax-Semantics Interface" (SYSSI), recently awarded to Prof. Daniel Hole and Alexander Wimmer (Universität Stuttgart), aims to shed more light on the syntax and semantics of scalarity, a notion that figures prominently in a wide range of linguistic works on very diverse languages. We take this pervasiveness in linguistic theory to be paralleled by one in human cognition. Scalarity has been conventionalized in various ways, giving rise to a diversity of subphenomena in natural language. The work we are conducting is broadly defined by, but not limited to, scalar particles like 'even' and 'only' across languages and their appearance in context. The crosslinguistic perspective we take mainly includes, but also exceeds, contrasts and similarities between Chinese, English and German (with occasional excursions to Vietnamese), allowing us to cover an unprecedented breadth of – often novel – data simultaneously and develop crosslinguistically valid, though parsimonious, analyses. It is one of the major goals of this project to come up with a new taxonomy of speaker-oriented scalar phenomena in natural language, and we particularly encourage submissions touching upon this empirical realm.

Invited speakers (in alphabetical order):
- Yael Greenberg (Bar-Ilan University)
- Aron Hirsch (University of Maryland)
- Magdalena Kaufmann (University of Connecticut)

Call for Papers:

We invite submissions of abstracts for 20-minute talks at our kick-off workshop, to be held at the University of Stuttgart on March 3 and 4, 2025. Any contributions engaging with the topic of scalarity in natural language are most welcome. Each talk will be followed by 10 minutes of discussion.

Abstracts should
- be in PDF-format,
- have margins of 1 inch (3 cm) on each side,
- have a font size of 12 pt throughout,
- not reveal the identities of the author(s),
- not exceed 2 (US Letter/A4) pages in length, excluding figures and references,
- not have their example sentences attached, but surrounded by the main text.

Please submit your abstract attached to an email to the following address: [email protected]

Submission deadline: January 10, 2025
Date of notification: January 25, 2025

Contact addresses:
- Daniel Hole ([email protected])
- Alexander Wimmer ([email protected])