LINGUIST List 27.3815

Tue Sep 27 2016

Calls: Semantics, Syntax, Typology/Germany

Editor for this issue: Kenneth Steimel <kenlinguistlist.org>


Date: 25-Sep-2016
From: Hedde Zeijlstra <hzeijlsuni-goettingen.de>
Subject: Workshop on the Meaning of Past Tense Morphology
E-mail this message to a friend

Full Title: Workshop on the Meaning of Past Tense Morphology

Date: 19-Dec-2016 - 21-Dec-2016
Location: Göttingen, Germany
Contact Person: Hedde Zeijlstra
Meeting Email: < click here to access email >

Linguistic Field(s): Semantics; Syntax; Typology

Call Deadline: 20-Oct-2016

Meeting Description:

In typical cases, past tense morphology simply marks that the event expressed by the verb or predicate is located prior to the time of utterance:

(1) John had a car (last year / *next year).

But this is not always the case. For example, in the embedded clause of (2), the past tense conveys, in its prominent reading, that the embedded clause expresses that the car owning holds at the time of John’s dream. In such Sequence-of-Tense (SoT) cases, the contribution of past tense appears vacuous; note that it can be replaced by present tense, John dreamed he has a car, which has a different reading.

(2) John dreamed he had a car.

In other cases, past tense seems to express something different than reference to the past. In counterfactual conditionals like (3)a, the past tense in the antecedent conveys that she does not own a car right now, as opposed to (3)b.

(3)
a. If she had a car now, she could drive to school.
b. If she has a car now, she can drive to school.

Sometimes, past tense is compatible with reference to times in the future. In some languages, past tense morphology may be used in imperatives, even though imperatives, being performative (cf. Han 1998, Schwager 2005, Grosz 2011, a.o.), generally require a present or future interpretation. And finally, past tense morphology can sometimes convey particular speech acts.

The apparently divergent semantic contribution of past tense morphology has received a large amount of study with respect to counterfactual conditionals and SoT. In contrast, the other three phenomena have not been investigated into much detail.

What is remarkable, however, is that these phenomena have almost always been analysed independently from each other, not as a uniform property of past tense morphology. Hence what is needed is an overarching perspective on past tense morphology that covers all usages, including those that seem to deviate from past tense reference.

Moreover, the cross-linguistic variation with respect to the meaning of past tense morphology has not been systematically investigated. Counterfactual conditionals have only been investigated in detail for a small number of languages (English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, and Hindi); the discussion on cross-linguistic variation with respect to SoT focuses primarily on English, Russian, Hebrew and Japanese, and a few related languages. However, establishing the range of cross-linguistic variation is a necessary ingredient for any theory of form-meaning (mis)matches, since it forms strong diagnostics in determining what constraints this variation is subject to and why this should be so.

A reason why an overarching theory of the syntax and semantics of past tense morphology is lacking is that, as of yet, it has not been investigated whether the phenomena outlined below, in particular counterfactual conditionals exploiting past tense morphology and SoT effects, are cross-linguistically independent or whether they are correlated. If theories of tense morphology take these phenomena to be independent from each other, this should naturally have typological consequences: it is then expected that they are not correlated (unless such a correlation would receive a separate explanation). If they are typologically related, this would call for a more integrated theory of past tense morphology. Hence, typological research can be used as an empirical testing ground to evaluate different theories of the semantics of past morphology.

Invited Speakers (confirmed so far):

Daniel Altschuler
Kees Hengeveld
Sabine Iatridou

Call for Papers:

The workshop discusses questions like the ones raised above and calls for papers that address:

- The usage of past tense morphology in counterfactual conditionals, Sequence-of-Tense constructions, or other constructions whose meaning does not straightforwardly follow from the semantics of past tense
- Cross-linguistic discussions or descriptions of the (unexpected) meaning of past tense morphology
- Correlations between different types of (unexpected) past tense usages. For instance, is that usage of past tense morphology in counterfactual conditionals in any way related to the availability of Sequence-of-Tense effects?

Abstracts should be anonymous, and submissions are limited to 2 per author, at least one of which must be co-authored. They must not exceed two pages, including data, references and diagrams. The font should be at least 11-point, with one-inch margins. They should be submitted as pdf-documents through EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=pasttense16.

Submission deadline: October 20, 2016

Notification: November 1, 2016


Page Updated: 27-Sep-2016