Update 16 March 2020: Workshop postponed due to novel coronavirus outbreak. We hope this will be a true postponement rather than an outright cancelation, but it is still premature to think about when we can try to hold this workshop again. We'll keep in touch with the authors of accepted papers via email. Thank you for your understanding, and stay healthy.
One way or another, most semantic theories are committed to basic ontological categories such as individuals, events, states, properties, or facts (see Moltmann 2017), with events playing an important role in modern linguistic semantics (Davidson, 1967; Vendler, 1967, 1968; Parsons, 1990, and others). Some linguistic categories, such as verbs, wear their eventivity on their sleeve. Others, such as object nouns, are typically non-eventive. This workshop focuses on eventive interpretations that arise from presumably non-eventive input forms.
For example, Larson (1998) proposes that certain nominals have an event variable in their argument structure that can be targeted for modification. This approach seems obvious for examples such as beautiful dancer, as dancer is deverbal, but less obvious for nouns such as king or violinist. Do these nouns truly have an event in their argument structure, are eventive readings primarily contributed by the modifiers, or should they best be modeled as the interplay between input forms?
(1) beautiful dancer 'someone who dances beautifully'
(2) just king 'king who rules justly'
(3) talented violinist 'someone who is talented at playing violin'
The question of how events are accessed, inferred, or otherwise coerced (see e.g. de Swart 2011) is not limited to phrasal modification. As in (4-6), certain word-formation processes also give rise to eventive interpretations, while the respective base categories do not (see Bauer et al. 2013):
(4) hammer (N) → to hammer (V); saddle (N) → to saddle (V)
(5) sedimentation; distinction; festschriftee
(6) to out-absurd; to enthrone; to belittle
Denominal verbs such as hammer are clearly eventive, but the more basic noun hammer is clearly not an event noun. It seems to be a productive process to derive new verbs from artifact nouns, raising the question of how an event can be systematically created in the construction of the verb. Similarly, nominalizations like sedimentation or deadjectival out-absurd have event-related readings, while their bases sediment and absurd do not. Both the semantic processes at play here and the applicability of different morphological theories are ill-understood at best.
In this workshop, we are interested in contributions that model output forms that denote events (or, broader, eventualities) but are based on presumably non-eventive input. We aim to bring together researchers working on both phrasal modification and word formation, believing that these domains encounter similar problems in modeling the interaction between compositional and lexical semantics, context, and world knowledge. By encouraging a mix of contributions on modification and word-formation from different languages, we hope to gain a deeper understanding of the semantics of eventualities themselves as well as the categories they are based on.
Possible topics for submissions include (but aren’t limited to):
We welcome contributions that explore these and related issues from a variety of descriptive, theoretical, and quantitative perspectives across frameworks, and we encourage submissions of work still in the early stages.
Bauer, Laurie, Rochelle Lieber & Ingo Plag. 2013. The Oxford reference guide to English morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Davidson, Donald. 1967. The logical form of action sentences. In Nicholas Rescher (ed.), The logic of decision and action, University of Pittsburgh Press.
de Swart, Henriëtte. 2011. Mismatches and coercion. In Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger & Paul Portner (eds.), Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter Mouton.
Larson, Richard K. 1998. Events and modification in nominals. In Devon Strolovitch & Aaron Lawson (eds.), Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 8, 145–168.
Moltmann, Friederike. 2017. Natural language ontology. In Mark Aronoff (ed.), Oxford research encyclopedia of linguistics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Parsons, Terence. 1990. Events in the semantics of English. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Vendler, Zeno. 1967. Linguistics in philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Vendler, Zeno. 1968. Adjectives and nominalizations. The Hague: Mouton.
We invite abstracts that address any of the topics discussed above, or related topics pertaining to events and modification or word-formation. We encourage submission of abstracts that reflect work still in progress and/or in its early stages.
Abstracts can be up to two pages in length, 12pt font, on A4 paper with 2.5cm margins, or on US letter paper with 1in margins. Please submit your abstracts using EasyChair, at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ewfm2020, by the end of February 15th, Central European Time.
The workshop will be held at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf's off-campus meeting venue, Haus der Universität, in the Düsseldorf city center. Confirmed invited speakers for the workshop are
Workshop dates: May 15th and 16th, 2020 Workshop postponed due to the virus outbreak.
This workshop is organized by Curt Anderson and Sven Kotowski (HHU Düsseldorf).
For further information, please email Curt Anderson at andersc@hhu.de or ewfmworkshop@gmail.com.