Short Title: DegPol2020
Date: 09-Mar-2020 – 10-Mar-2020
Location: Berlin, Germany
Contact Person: Cameron Wilson
Meeting Email: < click here to access email >
Linguistic Field(s): Philosophy of Language; Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics; Semantics; Syntax
Call Deadline: 30-Nov-2019
Meeting Description:
On March 9-10, 2020, the Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) in Berlin, Germany will host the workshop »Degree Expressions and Polarity Effects » (DegPol2020). Expressions of degree are often sensitive to the polarity of the environments that they occur in. Some degree modifiers are polarity items: as PPIs we find moderate-degree modifiers such as fairly, somewhat and their cross-linguistic counterparts (Nouwen 2013), as well as evaluative modifiers such as Catalan »ben » (Castroviejo & Gehrke 2015); NPIs include high-degree modifiers such as English »all that » (Israel 1996) and Japanese »anmari » (Matsui 2011). Other degree expressions show more subtle effects of polarity. As an example, high-degree predicates such as »gorgeous » and »delicious » are infrequent and are judged degraded – though not outright ungrammatical – in negated contexts (Morzycki 2012, Hoeksema 2018). Another focus of investigation is the phenomenon of litotes, and negative strengthening more generally (Horn 1989, 2002, 2010, 2017; van der Wouden 1996; Krifka 2007; Neuhaus 2016; Gotzner et al. 2018), where a negated scalar term takes on a stronger interpretation than the simple semantic one – for example the interpretation of »not too bright » to mean ‘rather stupid’. Finally, the positive and negative members of a pair of antonyms may behave differently with respect to the pragmatic inferences they give rise too, including scalar implicatures (van Tiel et al. 2018) and so-called ‘inferences towards the antonym’ (Ruytenbeek et al. 2017).
The goal of this workshop is to provide a forum for discussion of the interaction of scalarity and positive versus negative polarity, from the perspectives of semantics, pragmatics, syntax and psycholinguistics.
2nd Call for Papers:
We invite abstract submissions for 40-minute talks (30+10) and posters on topics including but not limited to:
– Theoretical and experimental investigations of PPI and / or NPI degree modifiers and degree constructions
– Litotes and other forms of pragmatic strengthening of negated scalar expressions
– Implicatures of scalar / degree expressions in positive versus negative environments
– Pragmatic inferences generated by positive versus negative scalar antonyms
– Corpus-based investigations of polarity effects in the degree domain
– The interaction of adjectival scale structure and polarity effects
– Processing of scalar polarity items
Abstracts must not exceed two pages of A4 or letter-sized paper, including data and references, with 1-inch (2.5 cm) margins on all sides, set in at least 11-point font. The abstract should have a clear title and should not identify the author(s). The abstract must be submitted electronically in PDF format, using our EasyChair electronic submission website: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=degpol2020
Important Dates:
Abstract Submission deadline: November 30, 2019
Notification of acceptance: late December, 2019
Workshop dates: March 9 – 10, 2020
Invited Speakers:
Berit Gehrke (Humboldt University Berlin)
Larry Horn (Yale University)
Laura Neuhaus (Duden)
Rick Nouwen (Utrecht University)
Organizers:
Stephanie Solt (Leibniz-ZAS)
Cameron Wilson (Leibniz-ZAS)