Full Title: Wanting, wishing, desiring (Workshop)

Date: 06-Nov-2025 - 07-Nov-2025
Location: Strasbourg, France
Contact Person: Antoine Consigny
Meeting Email: [email protected]

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Pragmatics; Semantics; Syntax
Subject Language(s): English (eng)

Call Deadline: 28-Feb-2025

Meeting Description:

This 2-day workshop aims to bring together researchers interested in the expression of volition, wish and/or desire in all its manifestations. It will take place in Strasbourg, France, on 6 and 7 November 2025.

Call for Papers:

“Wanting, wishing, desiring”

The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers interested in the expression of volition, wish and/or desire in English, in all its manifestations. Several levels of analysis can therefore be of interest: lexical, phraseological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic.

It will thus be possible to study the various linguistic expressions expressing volition and its degrees from a lexical and/or phraseological point of view: lexical words such as the three given in the title, but also phrases and fixed expressions, such as “I would like”, “I’m dying / gagging / craving for”, etc. Within this category, it will also be possible to focus on the expression of desire or volition through the use of euphemism (“I wouldn’t mind”, “I wouldn’t say no to”).

The syntactic aspect may concern, among others, the possible constructions linked to wishing or desiring: catenative constructions (“I want to leave now”) or using auxiliaries (“I shan’t answer that”, “Will you help me?”), type(s) of complementation (direct or indirect: “I want the best for you”, “I wish you the best”, “I wish only the best for you” but not “*I want you the best”). The different syntactic categories of words belonging to the notional field ranging from volition to desire may provide a productive angle: nouns, verbs, adjectives etc. Why can we say “a desire”, “a wish” when “*?a want” seems less easily acceptable? What is the link between “will” (noun), “willing” (adjective), “willingly” and “will” (lexical verb, modal verb)? In respect to the verbs of volition and desire, the scope of negation may be the subject of a specific study. It is known that “want” is a neg-raising verb, which implies that the scope of the negation is the predicate and not the verb, is it the same with other verbs of the same lexical field? What about the nouns? One may wish to focus on the morpho-syntactic aspect.

In semantics, among the relevant topics, one can mention the polysemous nature of words within the volition/wish/desire field: “want” expresses volition but also lack, whereas “lack” does not express volition; “wish” can be used in different contexts and with different meanings, as in “best wishes” or “You wish!” (whose French equivalent would be “Dans tes rêves!”). In that respect, a diachronic approach may shed a welcome light on the reasons for such polysemy. The questions of discrepancy, lack, but also of the counterfactual could also be looked into.
Wish or desire can also be seen as speech acts. In this connection, one could wonder whether linguistic and pragmatic meanings coincide, or if volition/desire/wish are only the pragmatic meaning of an expression whose semantic meaning is different. On the other hand, the expression of volition can lead to a pragmatic interpretation close to a request or an order. It can even in some contexts be explicitly taken as such by the co-speaker: “Your wish is my command”.

Finally, it will be possible to consider all those questions from a comparative perspective. One could indeed compare English and other languages in order to see the differences but also the similarities. Could some aspects of the field of volition/wish/desire be considered as universals?

Submission guidelines and deadlines:

The language of the workshop will be English. Anonymous proposals should be sent by email to Antoine Consigny and Stéphane Kostantzer : [email protected], [email protected].
They will include the title of the talk, a summary of about 300 words plus references. The name(s) and institution of the author(s) will be given separately, in the text of the email.

Submission deadline: 28 February 2025
Notification of acceptance: 17 April 2025