Workshop: Recent Issues in the Syntax of Questions
8-10 October 2018, Konstanz, Germany
The linguistic study of questions has a long history. Nevertheless, problems with questions still lack agreed-upon solutions in many respects -- partial movement and copy movement questions are a case in point. Another one is wh-in-situ. While information-seeking questions continue to be in the center of attention, the last few years have seen an enhanced interest in various other types: rhetorical questions, deliberative questions, surprise/disapproval questions, echo questions, emphatic or exclaimed questions etc. Syntactically, languages differ with respect to the formation of information-seeking and non-information-seeking questions. They either require the wh-phrase to be fronted into a sentence-initial position or they need to leave the wh-phrase in its in-situ position. They may depart from this general behavior for some pragmatic reasons. Still, there are some languages which are “in between” since they optionally allow both word order patterns.
This workshop intends to bring together syntacticians and semanticists who work on questions in typologically different languages. The goal is to look for convergence across comparable question types across languages or language families.
Invited Speakers:
- Lisa Lai-Shen Cheng (Universiteit Leiden)
- Hamida Demirdache (Université de Nantes)
- Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (National University of Singapore)
- Nomi Erteschik-Shir (Ben Gurion University of the Negev)
- Hadas Kotek (Yale University)
Programme
Monday, 8 October: Y311
9:15- | Invited Speakers Lisa Lai-Shen Cheng and Hamida Demirdache | Speaker variation and strategies in interpreting wh-in-situ |
10:15- 10:45 |
| Coffee |
10:45- 11:15 | Nicola Munaro | |
11:15- 11:45 | Bruno Lima | On some differences between wh-interrogatives and wh-exclamatives: The case of Brazilian Portuguese |
11:45- 12:15 | Antri Kanikli | |
12:15- 14:00 |
| Lunch |
14:00- 14:30 | Andreas Pankau | |
14:30- 15:00 | Bernat Castro López | |
15:00- 15:30 |
| Coffee |
15:30- 16:00 | Nicola Munaro & Cecilia Poletto | Towards a typology of wh-doubling in Northern Italian dialects |
18:00 |
| Guided tour through the city (Ralf Seuffert) |
19:15 |
|
Tuesday, 9 October: Y311
9:15- | Invited speaker Nomi Erteschik-Shir | <link file:294181>What information-structure theory can contribute to an understanding of superiority and intervention effects in multiple wh-questions |
10:15- 10:45 |
| Coffee |
10:45- 11:15 | Ankelien Schippers | |
11:15- 11:45 | Samual Alhassan Issah | On the licensing of traces and resumptive pronouns in Dagbani wh-extraction |
11:45- 12:15 | Christos Vlachos | |
12:15- |
| Lunch |
14:00- 14:30 | Caterina Bonan | Optional Insituness in Northern Italian dialects: derivation(s) |
14:30- 15:00 | Michael Zimmermann & Katharina Kaiser | Refining Current Insights into wh-in-situ interrogatives in Contemporary Hexagonal French |
15:00- | Coffee | |
| 15:30- 16:00 | Ramona Wallner | How French in-situ questions are not linked to givenness |
| 16:00- 16:30 | Hisashi Morita | Two kinds of in-situ languages and two ways to overcome islands |
| 19:15 | Conference Dinner: Tamaras Weinstube - Zum guten Hirten |
Wednesday, 10 October: Y311
9:15- | Invited speakers Hadas Kotek & Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine | |
10:15- 10:45 | Coffee | |
10:45- 11:15 | Hans-Martin Gaertner and Beata Gyuris | On the Echoic Licensing of Propositional Negation in Hungarian Polar e-Interrogatives |
11:15- 11:45 | Fabian Heck |
Practical informations:
- Bus connection between city and the university (lines 9A/9B/11)
- Floor plan of the university
Homepage of the Research Unit:
Organizers:
Josef Bayer, Georg A. Kaiser, Katharina Kaiser
Contact:
This workshop is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) (Research Group FOR-2111 “Questions at the interfaces”).