The Syntax and Semantics of Perception: Workshop at 58th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea
SLE 58 CauRPe workshop

Date: 26-Aug-2025 – 29-Aug-2025
Location: University of Bordeaux Montaigne, France
Contact Person: Michelle Sheehan
Meeting Email: michelle.sheehan1@newcastle.ac.uk
Web Site: https://sites.google.com/view/caurpe/events?authuser=0

 

Call Deadline: 13-Nov-2024

Meeting Description:

Perception verbs express human interactions with the world via the five major senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. Either the observer or the observee can function as a verbal subject, and many verbs alternate between these two options (in English and other languages – (Viberg 1984; 2001)):

1) a. Sam felt the cloth.
b. The cloth felt soft.

Amongst verbs which take the observer as subject, another important distinction is that between activity (2a) vs. experience (2b) (Viberg 1984; 2001):

2) a. Sara {watched/was watching} the birds.
b. Sara {saw/#was seeing} the birds.

In many cases, activity/experience verbs can also take clausal complements of different kinds, with complementation type linked to the distinction between direct and indirect perception (Dik & Hengeveld 1991).

3) a. I saw him walk(ing) down the street.[Direct perception of a state of affairs/event]
b. I saw that he had been crying. [Indirect perception of propositional content]
c. I see that you will be graduating next year. [Reception of the propositional content of a speech act]

The use of a gerund in (3b) famously conveys atelicity (Kirsner & Thompson 1976; Mittwoch 1990; Felser 1999).

Languages other than English make what seem to be similar distinctions but often in language-specific ways. In languages with limited/no non-finite embedding, direct perception is conveyed by other means. For example, Fijian uses nominalisations (as opposed to clausal complements) to convey what appears to be direct perception (Dik & Hengeveld (1991: 242, citing Dixon 1988: 38, 268); Japanese uses the particle –no (as opposed to –koto) (Dik & Hengeveld (1991: 242, citing Kuno 1973: 220); and Russian uses the complememntiser kak (as opposed to čto) (Dik & Hengeveld (1991: 242, citing Noonan (1985: 131).

At this workshop, we hope to bring together people working on the syntax and semantics of perception verbs in diverse languages in any theoretical framework, with a particular focus on clausal complementation patterns and their relationship to direct vs. indirect perception.

Call for Papers:

For the full call for papers and submission information see:
https://sites.google.com/view/caurpe/events?authuser=0

We welcome papers describing and/or analyzing the syntax of perception verbs in any language(s), especially those focusing on clausal complementation, potentially in comparison with other verb classes addressing the following or related questions:

1) Does the sense-modality hierarchy regulate morphosyntactic complexity cross-linguistically?
2) What are the attested semantic shifts in this domain beyond Indo-European languages?
3) Do perception verbs pattern with causatives cross-linguistically beyond Indo-European languages?
4) What kinds of clausal complements are possible with perception verbs cross-linguistically and why?
5) What kinds of meanings are associated with these different complement types?
6) Do all perception verbs accept all kinds of clausal complements?
7) What are the differences across different sensorial modalities?
8) Are there interactions between typological lexicalisation patterns (cf. Viberg and Norcliffe and Majid) and clausal complementation patterns?
9) What are the patterns of language change? How do different clausal complements emerge? Does their change follow the typological predictions?

We particularly encourage submissions from typological and/or comparative studies, as well as language-specific case studies with any theoretical approaches, discussing the lexicalization and complementation of perception verbs, their semantic shifts and/or diachronic changes, as well as the syntax-semantics mapping of their complements. We especially welcome work on understudied languages and language families.

Abstracts should be emailed to clementine.raffy@newcastle.ac.uk by 13th November 5pm at the latest.