DGfS Workshop: Secondary Information & Lingustic Encoding
In addition to expressing some main or primary content, an utterance often conveys secondary information. Under this term, we think of content that is not the “main point” of the utterance, but which rather provides side or background information and which is less prominent than the main content. Secondary content – which in recent literature is often called “non-at-issue content” – often also shows distinctive behavior with respect to its role in discourse structure and which discourse moves it licenses. Linguistic phenomena that fall under this category are, for instance, appositives and non-restrictive relative clauses, presupposition triggers, expressive adjectives, interjections and many more. The aim of this workshop is to tackle the question of what kinds of secondary meaning exist, if they can receive a unified characterization (and treat-ment) and how they influence the progression of discourse structure. On the formal side, we may ask if and how secondary information is linguistically encoded and set apart from the main content of an utterance. For instance, some content may be marked as secondary by means of intonation, punctuation, or syntactic disintegration, while other bearers of secondary information prima facie cannot be distinguished from expressions that convey primary content. Another controversy regards the question of whether certain lexical expressions or constructions are conventionally marked as conveying secondary content or whether the secondary nature of some information is determined conversationally by pragmatic processes.
Program
Wednesday, March 8
13:45–14:15 – Daniel Gutzmann (University of Cologne) & Katharina Turgay (University of Landau) Secondary information and linguistic encoding – an introduction
14:15–14:45 – Stefan Hinterwimmer (University of Cologne) The Bavarian discourse particle fei as a marker of non-at-issueness
14:45–15:15 – Holden Härtl (University of Kassel) The name-informing and the distancing use of sogenannt (‘so-called’). A pragmatic account
15:15–15:45 – Laura Dörre & Josef Bayer (University of Konstanz) The processing of secondary information conveyed by German modal particles
16:30–17:00 – Elena Castroviejo Miró (Ikerbasque and UPV/EHU) & Berit Gehrke (CNRS-LLF/Paris Diderot) Non-truth-conditional intensification. The case of good
17:00–17:30 – Osamu Sawada (Mie University) Interpretations of the embedded expressive motto in Japanese: Varieties of meaning and projectivity
17:30–18:00 – Claudia Borgonovo (Université Laval) Though as a marker of humbleness
Thursday, March 9
09:00–09:30 – Dirk Kindermann (Univeritsy of Graz) Fragmented contexts
09:30–10:00 – Kalle Müller (University of Tübingen) Sentence adverbials and (non-)at-issueness
10:00–10:30 – Patricia Amaral (Indiana University) Full NPs as personal pronouns: Reference, truth-conditional meaning, and use-conditional content
11:15–12:15 – Judith Tonhauser (Ohio State University) Relating not-at-issueness to the Question Under Discussion
12:15–12:45 – Mira Grubic (University of Potsdam) Additives and accommodation
13:45–14:15 – Elsi Kaiser (University of Southern California) (Un)expected secondary content in Finnish: Additives and scalars
14:15–14:45 – Agata Renans (Ulster Univerity) & Nadine Bade (University of Tübingen) & Joseph P. DeVeaugh-Geiss (University of Potsdam) Presupposition triggers in a cross-linguistic perspective: Maximize Presupposition vs. Obligatory Implicatures in Ga (Kwa)
Friday, March 10
11:30–12:30 – Robert Henderson (University of Arizona) & Eric McCready (Aoyama Gakuin University) Dog-whistles and the at-issue/non-at-issue distinction
12:30–13:00 – Corinna Trabandt & Alex Thiel & Emanuela Sanfelici & Petra Schulz (University of Frankfurt) Appositive interpretation of relative clauses - Is prosody the cue?
13:00–13:30 – Alexander Haselow (University of Rostock) Ad-hoc shifts from primary to secondary information in spontaneous speech
13:30–14:00 – Mikaela Petkova-Kessanlis (Sofia University) Parenthesen und ihre Funktionen in didaktisch aufbereiteten linguistischen Texten
Workshop Details
Organizers: Daniel Gutzmann (Frankfurt & Cologne), Katharina Turgay (Landau)
Contact: turgay{at}uni-landau.de
Website: http://danielgutzmann.com/secondary-information
Date: March 8–10, 2017
Venue: Saarland University, Saarbrücken
Deadline for submission: August 31, 2016.
Notification of acceptance: September 15, 2016.