Call for Abstracts

Workshop “(De-)composition and modification of attitude predicates”

Coordinators: Frank Sode, Valerie Wurm, Sarah Zobel; HU Berlin

46th Annual Meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS) 2024

28.02. - 01.03.2024, Ruhr University Bochum

Deadline for abstract submission: 21.08.2023

Notification of acceptance until: 10.09.2023

Invited speaker/s:
Kristina Liefke (Ruhr University Bochum)
Deniz Özyıldız (University of Konstanz)
Hazel Pearson (Queen Mary University of London)

Submissions to the workshop must be anonymous and must not reveal the identities of the authors in any form.
Abstracts should fit two pages (letter size or A4 paper, 2.54cm or 1 inch margins on all sides, 12 point font, Times New Roman), with an additional third page used exclusively for the following elements: references (obligatory), large figures or tables, as many lines as there are lines of glosses and translations in non-English glossed examples. Examples (glossed or not) should be interspersed in the text, rather than collected at the end. Submissions should be made via EasyAbs: https://easyabs.linguistlist.org/conference/DeCompAtt

The grammar, meaning, and use of attitude predicates has been an active topic of research in both linguistics and philosophy at least since Hintikka’s seminal work. While Hintikka’s work remains influential, it is clear that the analysis he offers falls short in the face of the variability and complexity of attitude predicates across languages. Two areas in which this has become especially apparent concern (i) the decomposition of attitude meanings and its consequences for the typology of attitude predicates (see e.g., Heim 1992 on epistemic and bouletic attitudes and subsequent work), as well and (ii) the composition of complex attitude predicates formed via modification or from combinations of lexemes/morphemes with or without their own attitudinal lexical semantics (e.g., Zimmermann 2006 on wissen ‘know’ plus wollen ‘want’ as ‘claim’ and ‘ask’). Greater insight into these two areas furthers our understanding of the overall landscape of attitude semantics and helps identify the primitive ’building blocks’ of attitude predicates cross-linguistically. Additionally, it may shed light on the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics at the syntax-semantics-interface of clausal embedding with attitude predicates. The main aim of this workshop is thus to encourage discussion between researchers contributing to these two areas based on new data, empirical observations, and theoretical considerations on:

• grammatical evidence for semantic decomposition—for attitude predicates in general and for subgroups thereof (e.g., mood marking (Villalta 2008, Giannakidou & Mari 2021), agreement and concord phenomena (Anand & Hacquard 2013), non-propositional attitudes (Montague 2007), gradable and evaluative meaning components (Villalta 2008, Koev 2019), event structure and complement types (Müller 2020, Özyıldız 2021, Liefke & Werning 2021)

• complex attitude predicates with potentially non-transparent composition and differing argument structure to their lexical/morphological parts (e.g., interactions among attitude verbs or between modals and attitude verbs (Zimmermann 2006), derived adjectives and adverbs with attitudinal stems)

We, therefore, aim to bring together researchers in semantics and philosophy and especially invite presentations of corpus-based, experimental, and typological results.

References:

Anand, Pranav & Hacquard, Valentine. 2013. Epistemics and attitudes. Semantics and Pragmatics 6(8): 1–59.

Giannakidou, Anastasia & Mari, Alda. 2021. Truth and Veridicality in Grammar and Thought. The University of Chicago Press.

Heim, Irene. 1992. Presupposition projection and the semantics of attitude verbs. Journal of Semantics 9: 183–221.

Koev, Todor. 2019. Strong beliefs, weak commitments. In: M. Teresa Espinal, Elena Castroviejo, Manuel Leonetti, Louise McNally & Cristina Real-Puigdollers (eds.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 23, Vol. 2, 1–18. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra (Cerdanyola del Vallès).

Liefke, Kristina & Werning, Markus. 2021. Experiential imagination and the inside/outsidedistinction. In: Naoaki Okazaki, Katsutoshi Yada, Ken Satoh & Koji Mineshima (eds.), New Frontiers in AI. LNCS. Springer, 96–112.

Montague, Michelle. 2007. Against Propositionalism. Nous 41(3): 503–518.

Müller, Kalle. 2020. Perception verbs and finite complement clauses. In: Christopher Piñón & Laurent Roussarie, Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics 13, 55–79. Paris, CSSP.

Özyıldız, Deniz. 2021. The Event Structure of Attitudes. University of Massachusetts Amherst PhD dissertation.

Villalta, Elisabeth. 2008. Mood and gradability: an investigation of the subjunctive mood in Spanish. Linguistics & Philosophy 31: 467–522.

Zimmermann, Ede. 2006. Knowledge and desire from a German perspective. In: Torgrim Solstad, Atle Grønn & Dag Haug (eds.), A Festschrift for Kjell Johan Sæbø, 211–223. Universitetet i Oslo