Call for Papers, Workshop: ADDITIVE AND RESTRICTIVE QUANTIFICATION IN DISCOURSE. COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES (ROMANCE AND GERMANIC LANGUAGES)
- Ort: Geneva, International Congress of Linguists (ICL 19)
- Beginn: 22.07.13
- Ende: 27.07.13
- Disziplinen: Sprachwissenschaft, Weitere Teilbereiche
- Sprachen: Französisch, Italienisch, Portugiesisch, Spanisch, Weitere romanische Sprachen, Sprachenübergreifend
Workshop title: ADDITIVE AND RESTRICTIVE QUANTIFICATION IN DISCOURSE
COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES
Anna-Maria De Cesare (Basel), Cecilia Andorno (Torino)
All the languages of the world probably have special linguistic strategies to perform two basic semantic / cognitive operations: additive and restrictive quantification of a piece of information (referent, temporal span, event etc.) in relation to a set of alternatives, as in I also / only like to read (König 1991, Gast & van der Auwera 2011). These two operations can be expressed through lexical forms (adverbs or particles, such as E. also / only, G. auch / nur, I. anche / solo, solamente, soltanto, Fr. aussi / seulement etc.; adjectives, such as It. solo, unico, Fr. seul, unique), through prosody (i.e. verum focus), as well as through morphological and syntactic means (cleft sentences and other syntactic structures, such as It. non … che..., non … se non). Unlike other linguistic quantifiers, such as numerals or indefinites, these forms always interact with the sentence information structure (at different levels) and play a crucial role in discourse organization (in discourse cohesion, in the thematic and/or rhetorical structure, in delimiting the boundaries of information units and in determining the nature of these units etc.; cf. Schwenter 2001, De Cesare 2004, Benazzo et al. 2004).
The goal of the Workshop is to better understand additive and restrictive quantification, in particular their role in discourse organization, by comparing the linguistic means available intra- and cross-linguistically, as well as discussing their path of acquisition in L1 and L2. Comparative / contrastive analyses of semantically similar forms in the same language and/or in different languages or language varieties have been proven to be a very fruitful method for achieving a fine-grained understanding of general, and potentially universal semantic and discourse related phenomena (cf., among many others related to additive and restrictive linguistic strategies, Horn 1981, Manzotti 1984, van der Auwera 1984, Blumenthal 1985, Foolen 1989, Andorno 2000, Lauwers 2006, Gast 2006, Dimroth et al. 2010, Borreguero Zuloaga in press).
The Workshop will be composed of individual papers and rounded up by a general assessment of our knowledge of the research questions outlined below. Invited, and confirmed, speakers to the Workshop include: Christine Dimroth (Osnabrück), Sandra Benazzo (Lille 3), Margarita Borreguero Zuloaga (Complutense Madrid and Heidelberg) and Volker Gast (Jena).
The Workshop organizers invite contributions that will tackle the following questions, preferably discussed on the basis of a solid empirical foundation (written / spoken; natural / elicited; native / learner varieties) and related to the Romance and the Germanic language groups:
a. What semantic and pragmatic instructional meaning(s) do additive and restrictive quantification forms convey? How is their semantic content to be related to their discourse functions? How do we measure what meaning is hard-wired in the linguistic form itself and what meaning component is conveyed by contextual factors?
b. What important quantitative (frequency use, discourse distribution) and qualitative (formal, semantic, functional) intra- and cross-linguistic similarities and differences are there between the linguistic strategies available to express additive / restrictive quantification in one, or more than one Romance / Germanic language(s)? How do we account for intra- and cross-linguistic differences in types and tokens?
c. What do the acquisition paths of additive and restrictive quantification strategies in L1 and/or L2 tell us about similar forms in different languages? How do we account for potential cross-linguistic influence in L2 acquisition and, conversely, for general, cross-linguistically valid acquisition paths?
d. More generally, what does the linguistic data available to date tell us about the underlying mental operations connected to addition and restriction? Is there a basic operation of addition / restriction as well as more complex forms of the same operations? Are there cognitive differences (for instance in terms of processing effort) between addition and restriction? And how do we account for them?
***Precisions for abstract submission***
The proposals (abstract 500 words + bibliography) are to be sent directly to the workshop organizers (anna-maria.decesare@unibas.ch and ceciliamaria.andorno@unito.it).
The participants to the workshop will be personally invited to post their abstract on the website of the Congress in fall 2012, after the closure and the selection of papers for the parallel sessions.
Deadline: June 30, 2012
Publiziert von: LS