Full Title: Adverbs and Adverbials at the Form-meaning Interface: Diachronic and Synchronic Perspectives
Short Title: AAFMI 2022

Date: 18-May-2022 – 20-May-2022
Location: Göttingen, Germany
Contact Person: Katharina Paul
Meeting Email: < click here to access email >

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Historical Linguistics; Pragmatics; Semantics; Syntax

Call Deadline: 31-Jan-2022

Meeting Description:

The conference deals with all questions around the classification, distribution and historical development of adverbs, adverbials and – related to them – similar word classes, such as modal particles. Theoretical approaches are welcome, as are studies and papers with an empirical (corpus and/or psycholinguistic) focus.

Call for Papers:

Adverbs and adverbials at the form-meaning interface:
diachronic and synchronic perspectives (AAFMI 2022)

Date: 18-20 May 2022
Location: Göttingen

Invited speaker:

Artemis Alexiadou (Humboldt University of Berlin)
Katrin Axel-Tober (University of Tübingen)
Karin Pittner (Ruhr University Bochum)

Organizers:

Katharina Paul
Marco Coniglio
Markus Steinbach

Description:

Adverbs and adverbials are known to be of the most controversial topics in linguistics. They are often referred to as a residual grammatical class (Restlasse; Geuder 2019). Nevertheless – or just because of that –, in recent years, adverbs and adverbials have become the focus of research in various fields of linguistics and, moreover, several studies on the morpho-syntactic and semantic features of adverbs, the adjective-adverb distinction and the grammaticalization of adverbs have been carried out (cf. Alexiadou 1997; Axel-Tober & Müller 2017; Cinque 1999; Frey & Pittner 1998; Pittner, Elsner & Barteld 2015 among others).
The aim of this conference is to bring together recent empirical and theoretical investigations on the classification, distribution and historical development of adverbs, adverbials, and related word classes, e. g. modal particles. For this, the conference is attractive to descriptive, historical, theoretical, typological as well as experimental linguists. Questions to be addressed include – but are not limited to – the following:

– How can we develop a uniform theory for adverbs and adverbials at the form-meaning interface?
– What are the (synchronic as well as diachronic) core properties of adverbs from a typological perspective?
– How were adverbial functions expressed grammatically in the history of Germanic languages?
– How do different kinds of adverbs grammaticalize? And how do they develop into discourse or modal particles?
– What can experimental studies on the acquisition, grammaticalization and processing of adverbs and adverbials tell us about their properties and/or distribution?

The conference language is English. We are confident that the conference can take place in person. If not, we will opt for an online or hybrid format. The conference, organised by the German Department of the University of Göttingen as part of the network Linguistics in Göttingen, is associated with the RTG 2636: Form-meaning mismatches.

References:

Alexiadou, A. 1997. Adverb placement. A case study in antisymmetric Syntax. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Axel-Tober, K. & K. Müller. 2017. Evidential adverbs in German. Diachronic development and present-day meaning. Journal of Historical Linguistics 7(1-2), 9–47.
Cinque, G. 1999. Adverbs and Functional Heads: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press.
Frey, W. & Pittner, K. 1998. Zur Positionierung der Adverbiale im deutschen Mittelfeld. Linguistische Berichte 176, 489–534.
Geuder, W. 2019. Eine Art Wortart: Das Adverb im Deutschen. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 38(2), 191–242.
Pittner, K., Elsner, D. & Barteld, F. (eds.). 2015. Adverbs: functional and diachronic aspects. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Abstract Submission:

We invite submissions for a presentation (35 minutes + 10 minutes for questions) or a poster. Abstracts must not be longer than 500 words in length, plus references. Please submit your anonymous abstract via EasyChair:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=aafmi2022

Deadline for submission: 31 January 2022
Notification of acceptance: 28 February 2022

For further information, please contact: katharina.paul(at)uni-goettingen.de