Stadt: Freiburg im Breisgau

Beginn: 2019-02-15

Ende: 2019-02-16

Organization team: Davide Garassino, Daniel Jacob, Anja Stoll

The goal of this workshop is to explore and discuss ‘central’ and ‘peripheral’ uses of certain syntactic structures, such as cleft constructions, focus fronting and clitic dislocation, with special regard to Romance and Germanic languages. As shown by many corpus-based studies, the actual functions of these structure are more varied and nuanced as commonly assumed in the literature. Sometimes they even convey values which seem to contradict or even subvert the ones believed to be more typical, as in the case of the non-focalizing uses of cleft sentences, which in many text types even outnumber the ‘prototypical’ focalizing ones. In the light of these aims, the invited contributions will address the following open questions:

1. How can the wide spectrum of functions shown by syntactic structures as cleft sentences, fronting and clitic dislocations be adequately analyzed in theoretical terms? More specifically: is the intuitive distinction between more or less prototypical uses well justified or is it only a superficial phenomenon calling for a deeper explanation (for instance, one involving the overall discourse structure and organization)?

2. To what extent can the pragmatic functions of a certain syntactic structure vary depending on the language? Moreover: to what extent can the pragmatic functions of a syntactic structure vary depending on diamesic factors and different text types and genres even within the same language?

3. Regarding the relation between syntax and prosody, more or less prototypical uses of certain constructions (such as cleft sentences) tend to be distinguished by different accents and intonational contours. What can similar empirical observations reveal about the relationship between information structure and prosody?

4. Methodologically, how can cross-linguistic, corpus-based research contribute to the study of information structure in context? Which tools, from a quantitative/statistical point of view, are (the most) suitable for studying such relations?

The results of the workshop should serve, on the one hand, to better understand the interaction between syntax and pragmatics. On the other hand, the workshop should help to promote the synergy between empirical research and theoretical pragmatics, especially needed at a time in which large amounts of data are becoming increasingly available and are challenging positions which have been taken for granted for decades.

Admission is free and no registration is required, but please contact us if you are interested in attending the workshop

Contact:
Davide Garassino, University of Zurich, davide.garassino@uzh.ch

Daniel Jacob, University of Freiburg, daniel.jacob@romanistik.uni-freiburg.de

Funding: Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung and Dr. Jürgen und Irmgard Ulderup-Stiftung

Program

Friday, 15 February 2019

9.00 – 9.15
Introduction

9.15 – 10.00
Dejan Matić (Münster): Information Structure and Inferential Pragmatics

10.00 – 10.45
Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri (Roma Tre): Distinguishing psychological Given/New from linguistic Topic/Focus makes things clearer

10.45 – 11.00
Coffee Break

11.00 – 11.45
Karen Lahousse (Leuven): The Interaction between Contrast and Syntax

11.45 – 12.30
Arndt Riester (Cologne): Messy text vs. noble theory? Objective discourse analysis with QUD trees

12.30 – 13.15
Viviana Masia (Roma Tre): Reassessing the status of Second Occurrence Focus in information structure: evidence from phonological, processing and micropragmatic perspectives

13.15 – 14.30
Lunch

14.30 – 15.15
Manuela Caterina Moroni (Trento) / Matthias Heinz (Salzburg): On unexpected accents in German and Italian

15.15 – 16.00
Christoph Gabriel / Jonas Grünke (Mainz): Non-canonical use of marked syntactic structures in Bulgarian Judeo-Spanish: Evidence from semi-spontaneous data

16.00 – 16.30
Coffee Break

16.30 – 17.15
Andreas Dufter (Munich): Tracing the history of non-finite verb fronting in Medieval French

17.15 – 18.00
Daniel Jacob (Freiburg): Rhetorical and grammatical paradoxes: On the impossibility of stating grammatical rules

20.00
Conference Dinner

Saturday, 16 February 2019

9.15 – 10.00
Pierre Larrivée (Caen): The curious case of the very rare Focus movement in French

10.00 – 10.45
Lena Karssenberg (Leuven): French il y a clefts: discourse motivation and (non)prototypicality

10.45 – 11.00
Coffee Break

11.00 – 11.45
Aria Adli (Cologne): On the pragmatic relation between question-answer-pairs and cleft structures

11.45 – 12.30
Davide Garassino (Zurich): French cleft sentences across genres. What is (not) prototypical?

12.30 – 13.15
Uli Reich (Berlin): Ways of Focus: A fine-grained Pragmatics for Cleft Constructions in Portuguese and Spanish

13.15 – 14.30
Lunch

14.30 – 15.15
Malte Rosemeyer (Freiburg): An interactional account of the use of clefted wh-interrogatives in Peninsular and Caribbean Spanish

15.15 – 16.00
Anna-Maria De Cesare (Basel): Non-prototypical syntactic and information configurations of focus adverbs

16.00 – 16.30
Coffee Break

16.30 – 17.15
Margarita Borreguero Zuloaga (Madrid): Cleft sentences in the history of Spanish: new evidence on the focusing vs. cohesive function debate

17.15 – 18.00
Marco García García (Cologne): Exclamation Focus

18.00 – 18.30
Final remarks

Beitrag von: Davide Garassino

Redaktion: Unbekannte Person