Full Title: Polar Question Form[s] Across Languages

Date: 24-Apr-2025 - 25-Apr-2025
Location: University of Amsterdam Humanities Labs/Bushuis, Netherlands

Linguistic Field(s): Phonology; Pragmatics; Semantics; Syntax; Typology

Call Deadline: 21-Feb-2025

Call for Papers:

After the success of our first workshop Polar Question Meaning[s] Across Languages, we are launching a second POQAL meeting, this time focusing on form. How are polar questions expressed in syntax, morphology, intonation? How do components of the grammar of each language constrain and determine these ways, e.g. in the inventory of functional categories, the expression of negation, focus, polarity, intonational characteristics, pragmatic division of labor among forms? How do fine grammatical components correlate with fine components of meaning? What crosslinguistic generalizations can be made in this new level of granularity?

The last decades have seen a steady increase in work on polar question meaning, with relatively new notions like bias becoming front and center. The empirical scope has also expanded, to include not only plain interrogatives but also declaratives, tags, and alternative questions. These forms raise important questions about the relationship between form and meaning, as the so-called non-canonical forms induce finer components of meaning like bias.

Beyond these polar-like question forms familiar from widely studied languages, various other lexical and structural means are deployed to form paradigms of polar-like questions across languages. These include various particles, forms related to embedding, negation and focus. It is sometimes not clear how canonically applies to these paradigms, yet different forms relate to different components of complex polar question meaning. Proposals have been made that the syntax and prosody of polar questions hold a discrete complexity, with dedicated components spelling out pieces of the question act.

This workshop aims to bring together work that continues this line of research by looking closely into expression strategies of polar questions. We invite abstracts that formally address aspects of polar(-like) question forms across languages, and theorize on polar question form and its relation to meaning based on a wide range of data (of forms as well as languages). We are particularly excited to hear about formal grammatical phenomena such as clausal structure, embedding, negation, focus and intonation driving certain pragmatic effects, the nature of those effects and their analysis, and emerging crosslinguistic generalizations once we look at polar question marking components at this level of detail.

Please limit abstracts of max. 2 pages to two abstracts per (co-)author and send to [email protected].

Invited speakers:
⁃ Prosody [newly confirmed]: Anja Arnhold (University of Alberta)
⁃ Variation: Andreas Hölzl (Universität Potsdam)
⁃ Syntax: Martina Wiltschko (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

Important data:
• Abstracts due [revised]: February 21, 2025
• Decisions announced [revised]: February 24, 2025
• WS Date: April 24-25, 2025
• WS location: University of Amsterdam Humanities Labs room F0.01. https://www.uva.nl/en/locations/binnenstad/bushuis.html?origin=uq5cmYnUS0mTwIPG0l%2FQxA
• Website (please check for any updates): https://sites.google.com/view/poqal-2/home
• Contact person: Beste Kamali ([email protected], [email protected])

This workshop is sponsored by the Marie Skłodowska Curie fellowship EPOQ-101067203 granted to Beste Kamali.