Date: 19-Jul-2021 – 25-Jul-2021
Location: Campinas, Brazil
Contact Person: Luciana Sanchez-Mendes
Meeting Email: < click here to access email >
Web Site: https://www2.iel.unicamp.br/v-cilh/english/
Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Pragmatics; Semantics
Call Deadline: 21-Dec-2020
Meeting Description:
Organizers: Ana Paula Quadros Gomes (UFRJ) / Luciana Sanchez Mendes (UFF)
This workshop aims to gather studies focusing on semantic and pragmatic variation in natural languages.
Since Greenberg’s (1963) seminal work on typology of syntactic constructions, a new agenda on the Linguistics of the 20th Century has emerged. That rationalist approach aims to identify universal properties across languages. A natural unfolding of this view was to look at how natural languages vary on mapping semantic notions.
Lexical semantic change studies in historical linguistics traditionally focus on how word meaning varies and changes over the course of time.
Studies on change and variation could go beyond the word level, including the “semantic glue” as a target of scrutiny, by the comparison of functional/grammatical morphemes meaning and the principles of semantic composition in different languages. New semantic typologies have arisen. Barwise and Cooper’s (1981) DP Universal, for example, lead to a discussion of the existence of two distinct mechanisms in natural languages: A-quantification and D-quantification (Bach et al. 1995). This topic was explored on Brazilian Portuguese (Schmitt & Munn 1999; Müller 2002, a.o.); indigenous languages (e.g. Vieira, 1995 on Asurini do Trocará; Müller et al 2006 on Karitiana) and Libras – Brazilian Sign Language – (Sá et al., 2012; Almeida-Silva, 2013). There is a vast literature on the cross-linguistic variation and possible universals in nominal phrases, (Chierchia 2010; Doetjes 2012, a.o.). The topic was discussed in Brazilian Portuguese (Paraguassu and Müller 2007: de Oliveira and Rothstein 2011) and indigenous languages (Müller et al 2006 on Karitiana; Lima, 2014 on Yudja; Sanchez-Mendes et al., 2020 on Terena, a.o.). Von Fintel and Matthewson (2008) discuss the variation on the verbal domain, finding it difficult to postulate universals beyond the internal building blocks of event structures (such as Dowty’s 1979 DO predicate). In Brazilian Portuguese, Basso (2007) discussed specificities of BP accomplishments and Ilari and Basso (2004) showed distinguishing properties of stative predicates. Adaptations on the canonical tests of Aktionsarten to analyze the verbal were discussed for Karitiana (Sanchez-Mendes 2014) and Libras (Simonassi 2019). Pragmatics is also subject to intra and cross-linguistic variation. Intra-lingual variation phenomena may be divided in micro-social (situational) and macro-social (intercultural) variation.Labovian Sociolinguistic claims that the variation witnessed at all levels of language reveals “structured heterogeneity.” Synchronic variation mirrors diachronic change. Duarte (2020) focus on a semantic variant (such as animacy and specificity features) as stimulating Brazilian Portuguese to undergo a parametric change from a prodrop to a non-prodrop language. Although in Labovian frameworks semantic features seriously influence syntactics, there are very few sociolinguistic studies on semantic variation itself. Robson (2012) alerts: “for the past 40 years of sociolinguistic research has focused on exploring the meaning of variation (cf. Eckert, 2012), while leaving the variation of meaning aside.” In this symposium, we wish semantics to gain the protagonism it has been denied.
Call for Papers:
We invite submissions on any of the above topics. We specially encourage submissions on under-represented languages such as indigenous and sign languages.
Information about abstract submission and registration can be found on the website of the main conference: https://www.even3.com.br/vcilh2021/