27th - 28th September 2018 in S 15 (Seminargebäude)

Joint workshop organized by C02, C03, B04 and funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) as part of the Collaborative Research Center 1252 Prominence in Language. (Program: download pdf)

Invited speakers are the following:

Artemis Alexiadou (HU Berlin)
Janice Carruthers (Queen's University, Belfast)
Petra Hendriks (Groningen)
Emmanuelle Labeau (Aston University, Birmingham)
Manuel Leonetti (Alcalá)
Henriette de Swart (Utrecht)

Workshop description

Reference to events and individuals is one of the main functions of communication. Discourse dynamics involve ordering and interrelating eventualities and times and also a number of discourse referents. These discourse entities are introduced, foregrounded and backgrounded, they may be maintained or reintroduced, based on how the discourse is structured. In order to express the diverse functions, each language displays a specific range of morphosyntactic possibilities (tense-aspect categories, referring expressions, etc.).

This workshop provides a forum for understanding which cognitive and linguistic mechanisms underlie reference production, comprehension and acquisition. One of its main aims is to define the interaction between reference to individuals and events and to compare different proposals of how to model this interaction. For example, the Collaborative Research Center "Prominence in Language" at the University of Cologne considers prominence as a pivotal notion in the structuring of the representations of eventualities (Becker / Egetenmeyer submitted), individuals (Torregrossa / Bongartz / Tsimpli to appear) and discourse segments (Jasinskaja et al. 2015, 146-148, Brocher / von Heusinger 2018).

In the workshop, linguistic and cognitive mechanisms of reference will be investigated with particular emphasis on Romance languages, by analyzing relevant linguistic phenomena, such as the perfective-imperfective divide, DOM-marking (García García 2018, von Heusinger / Kaiser 2011), and the opposition between null and overt pronominal forms. 

Program 

Thursday, 27 September

9:45-10:00 Welcome

10:00-11:00 Henriëtte de Swart: Tense use in discourse and dialogue

11:00-12:00 C02: Martin Becker and Jakob Egetenmeyer: A Prominence-based account of temporal discourse structure and the case of Free Indirect

Discourse

12:00-12:30 Coffee break

12:30-13:30 Emmanuelle Labeau: Game, set and match: Is a change in perspective outing the French passé simple from sports reports?

13:30-15:00 Lunch

15:00-16:00 Janice Carruthers: Temporal Framing and Connectors in Oral Narrative: Evidence from French and Occitan

16:00-16:30 Coffee break

16:30-17:30 C03: Maria Andreou, Christiane Bongartz, Claudia Rizzo and Jacopo Torregrossa: Production vs. comprehension: Evidence from referential strategies in bilingual children

17:30-18:30 Petra Hendriks: Explaining individual variation in reference production and comprehension through cognitive modeling

18:30-18:45 Wrap-Up Day 1

19:15 Dinner at Il Cavaliere, Hans-Sachs-Straße 1, Cologne

Friday, 28 September

10:00-11:00 Manuel Leonetti: Coherence relations in pronominal and temporal anaphora: null subjects and imperfective past

11:00-11:30 Coffee break

11:30-12:30 Artemis Alexiadou: Experiencers and differential object marking

12:30-13:30 B04: Klaus von Heusinger and Marco García García: Prominence scales and micro-variation of DOM in Spanish

13:30-14:45 Lunch

14:45-15:45 Roundtable