Workshop 1, Topic: Deictics and Demonstratives: Comparative and Empirical Approaches

Organizer: Volker Gast (Friedrich Schiller University Jena)

This workshop aims to bring together linguists and scholars from related fields investigating the use of expressions whose interpretation is a function of the context of speech (deixis), often combined with a non-verbal signal, such as a pointing gesture (demonstratives). Deixis and demonstration are central elements of linguistic systems and play a particularly important role in language acquisition. Their interpretation relies on both social and situated cognition, insofar as they require joint attention and perspective taking, and physical interaction with elements of the context of speech.  Deixis and demonstratives are thus located at the interface of linguistic and meta-linguistic behaviour, opening up a broad range of topics for investigation.

Abstracts are invited dealing with any aspect relating to the function or use of deictics and demonstratives, e.g.

• • • • • comparative (typological or contrastive) studies of spoken or signed languages
        • empirical (observational or experimental) investigations of their interpretation, use or acquisition
        • multimodal studies dealing with the interaction of verbal and non-verbal (e.g. visual, kinesic, haptic) signals

Workshop 2, Topic: The grammar of results

Organizer: Éva Kardos (University of Debrecen, Hungary)

In this workshop we would like to explore the syntax and semantics of result-denoting elements such as verbal particles, prefixes and resultative secondary predicates across languages. We invite submissions addressing, but not limited to, the following questions:

• • • • 1. What kind of constraints characterize the number and type of results that can be expressed in a single clause? This question can, for example, be addressed in the context of Slavic prefixes and English expressions such as knock someone unconscious to the ground and knock someone down dead. According to Ausensi and Bigolin (2021), these English examples illustrate structures with a low depictive and a result state complement and so do not pose a challenge for the Unique Path Constraint (Tenny 1987, 1994, Goldberg 1991) on the condition that it is understood as a syntactic constraint. As for Slavic prefixes, it has been proposed by a number of scholars that they fall into two (or three) classes based on their (in)ability to stack and their position before the verb (and some other diagnostics) (Svenonius 2004, Tatevosov 2008). For instance, lexical prefixes have been argued to be unable to stack and occupy a VP-internal position, whereas superlexical prefixes can stack and are often assumed to sit further away from the verbal root in a VP-external position (Svenonius 2004). Recently, however, Marušič et al. (2022) have carried out a corpus analysis of prefixes in Slovenian and found that a small set of prefixes do appear in stacking environments (see, for example, vz-peti ‘climb’ vs. po-vz-peti ‘climb’ and po-staviti ‘put/stand’ and vz-po-staviti ‘establish’) in spite of the fact that they express idiosyncratic or spatial meanings, typical of lexical prefixes. They propose based on Žaucer (2013) that they should be analyzed as result and result-modifying prefixes and so again argue against the hypothesis that two results of the same type appear within the VP. It would be interesting to examine whether such structures are also available in other (Slavic) languages and, if so, how it is best to represent their syntax and semantics. If, by contrast, they are not available, it would be good to see what alternative strategies languages use to express what the Slovenian doubly prefixed verbs like those above do.
        2. What kind of semantics characterizes result-denoting elements across languages? English-type verbal particles like up in eat up and resultative secondary predicates seem to just express result states, whereas result-denoting verbal particles like meg in Hungarian have been shown to be also associated with event quantification (Halm 2015, Kardos 2016). Some Slavic prefixes have also been argued to encode event quantification, but they are also known to have adverbial meanings rather than resultative ones (see Svenonius’s (2004) superlexical prefixes). We would like to see if resultative elements in other languages have a quantificational effect on events and whether this has any consequences for their structural representation.
      • 3. What is the relationship between the expression of results and telicity? In English it has been argued that these notions are independent of each other (Rappaport Hovav and Levin 2010) as many result verbs such as cool and warm are not lexically telic and “some instances of telicity cannot be analyzed in terms of a result state” (ibid. 27) (see, for example, telic read a book), whereas in languages like Hungarian a morphologically complex result verb is often necessary for telic interpretations (contextual cues do not generally play a role in telicity) and so the two notions can more easily be equated here. It would be useful to look into other languages, as well, and see how it is best to model the relationship that holds between these notions.

Workshop 3, Topic: Acquiring speech sounds and prosody in childhood and adulthood

Organizers: Václav Jonáš Podlipský & Šárka Šimáčková (Palacký University Olomouc)

The workshop, a follow-up to Kateřina Chládková’s keynote talk, invites researchers in the fields of L1 and L2 phonetics and phonology to present the results of empirical and theoretical work. We welcome contributions that address topics in first- and second-language speech acquisition including, but not limited to, the following areas:

• • • • • the acquisition of L1 and L2 segments and prosody
        • L1 and L2 speech perception and production
        • L1 and L2 sound representation and patterning
        • native and non-native speech
        • cross-linguistic influences in bilingual speech
        • the neurolinguistics of sound processing
        • speech development in infancy
        • methodological innovations in L1 and L2 speech learning research

The conference programme here (as of 1 June 2023)

The Olinco 2023 Book of Abstracts: available here