Workshop call: Minor Sentence Types – their form at its impact on grammar
Submission Deadline: 30th March 2025
Invited speaker: Jonathan Ginzburg (Laboratoire de linguistique formelle, Université de Paris).
The large bulk of research in syntax and sentential semantics focuses on assertive declarative clauses, information seeking interrogative clauses, and, to a much lesser extent, imperatives. A key concept forthe understanding of word order variation and prosodic prominence was introduced by Roberts (2012) and Ginzburg (1996) in form of the Question Under Discussion (QUD). As has been shown on various occasions, different word order permutations and stress patterns express different focus placement. Focused constituents typically occupy a prominent position in the clause or exhibit more prominent prosodic features. The placement and the prosodic properties of focussed constituents is determined by QUD.
To gain a deeper understanding of these major sentence types and their interaction with the discourse, it is often productive to analyse the internal structure of minor sentence types. Minor sentence types frequently differ from major ones in that they (i) lack features that are characteristic of major sentence types such as overt subjects, finite verbs—or verbs all together; (ii) exhibit unusual word order and/or prosody, as seen in English exclamatives (What small hands!), (iii) or they exhibit segmental material, such as particles or markers, that does not occur in other sentence types.
Questions of interest may involve, but are not limited to, various aspects of the relationship between form and meaning, as illustrated below:
- What is the role of finiteness in determining the illocutionary force? Are certain speech acts
dependent on the presence or absence of finiteness (cf. Nikolaeva 2007, Truckenbrodt 2006, Klein
2008)?
- What is the role of the QUD in minor sentence types? Is it necessary to assume QUDs to account
for prosodic prominence and/or word order variation?
- Do minor speech acts or sentence types involve a communicative intention or deontic speech act
operator as proposed by Truckenbrodt (2006:268–278)? (e.g. assertion as SPKR wants ADDR to
add p to the common ground, questions as SPKR wants ADDR to extend to the common ground
with respect to p or ¬p)
- Which impact does the marked form of minor sentence type have on what kind of at-issue and/or
non-at-issue meaning it may convey (cf. Potts 2005, Potts 2015)?
- What is the underlying syntactic representation of defective minor sentence types? Is their any
empirical evidence for covert verbs, subjects or matrix predicates?
- Is there any empirical evidence to determine which approach to the relationship between sentence
type and illocutionary force is more adequate: correspondence approach or derivational approach
as proposed by Reis (1999) and Meibauer (2013)?
This workshop follows the annual HPSG-colloquium but warmly welcomes contributions from any theoretical framework including constraint-based theories such as GPSG, HPSG, LFG, CG, CxG and derivational approaches such as Minimalism. Submissions related to the application of theoretical linguistics in NLP, as relevant to the workshop’s theme, are also encouraged. The workshop aims to provide a forum for proponents of diverse theoretical approaches who are open to learning from one another. This one day long workshop is going to be held as an hybrid event welcoming submissions for in-presence and online presentations.
Extended call with full bibliography
