INVITED SPEAKER Regine Eckardt (University of Konstanz)
ORGANIZERS Ilaria Frana (University of Enna “Kore”) and Paula Menendez Benito (University of Tuebingen)
DATE September 16, 2024
VENUE Palazzo Pupillo, Ortigia Syracuse
CONTACT ilaria.frana@unikore.it
Over the last few decades, cross-linguistic research has yielded significant insights into the semantics of evidential markers, as illustrated by work on native American languages (see Faller 2002 for Cuzco Quechua; Matthewson et al 2007 for St’á’imcets; Murray 2017 for Cheyenne, a.o.), Asian languages (see Garrett 2001 for Tibetan; Lim & Lee 2012 for Korean, McCready & Ogata 2007 for Japanese, a.o.) and European languages (see Izvorski 1997 on the Bulgarian evidential perfect; Faller 2007 on German sollen; Frana & Menéndez Benito 2023 on the Italian evidential future, a.o.).
A substantial part of this research highlights the role of evidentials in resetting default parameters associated with canonical assertions and questions, affecting the way they resulting speech act impacts the Common Ground (CG). In assertions, evidentials have been argued to perform non-negotiable updates to the CG (Murray 2017), to reset the default quality threshold normally required to put forward a proposition (Davis et al 2007) or to trigger a perspective shift along the lines of free indirect discourse (Faller 2019). In interrogatives, evidentials may give rise to conjectural questions which, unlike canonical questions, do not request an answer, but rather invite the addressee to engage in joint deliberation (Eckardt 2020). More recently, a new body of research has emerged that explores the interaction of evidentials and the CG management devices that give rise to bias in questions (e.g., Korotkova 2016, Frana & Menéndez Benito 2019, Bhadra 2020). While still fragmentary, these studies already indicate that evidentials provide a good testing ground for investigating interactions between linguistic markers that trigger non-default CG updates.
The goal of this workshop is to contribute to our understanding of how evidentials help shape the CG by providing a forum for novel work investigating the use of evidential markers in non-canonical speech acts. We aim to bring together researchers employing a variety of theoretical and empirical methodologies (e.g., fieldwork, experimental or computational methods), and seek to discuss open issues and recent developments in this area of research. We particularly encourage submissions that provide insights arising from languages that are underrepresented in the previous literature.
The workshop will be hosted by the University of Enna “Kore”, as a satellite event.
Call: Abstracts are invited for 30-40 minute talks, including discussion. Abstracts must be anonymous, in pdf format, and they are not to exceed two pages in 12 point font, and with margins of 1 inch/2.5 cm on all sides. One extra page can be reserved for examples that require glosses. Please indicate 3-4 keywords in your abstract.