CFP: Workshop on Modality and Subjectivity

The Dept. of Linguistics and the Workshop on Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Chicago are organizing a one-day workshop on Modality and Subjectivity. We invite abstracts for 30-minute talks (plus 15 mins discussion) in any area related to the title topics— e.g. modal verbs, non-veridical moods (subjunctive, imperative), modal adverbs, the future, modality and temporality, including also papers on evidentiality, and the relation between modality and illocutionary force. We encourage submissions that involve various methodologies, including theoretical semantic, philosophical, as well experimental or corpus based submissions. The treatment of modal expressions in language is grounded in modal logic. Kratzer enriches the logical framework by introducing new parameters such modal bases and ordering sources. These enable a more refined interpretation of subtle distinctions such as epistemic, deontic, bouletic, and teleological modality (see Portner 2009). At the same time, ongoing crosslinguistic formal semantic work resulted in broadening the phenomena studied under modality and revealed considerable variation in the mapping between meanings and forms. As a result, modality has been connected to notions such as nonveridicality, evaluation and bias (Giannakidou and Mari 2013). There now seems to be consensus that by modalizing a sentence an individual anchor is, at a very fundamental level, commenting on the proposition, and this commenting often involves weakening the epistemic commitment of the anchor. This appears to characterize also evidential markers. Modality thus appears to involve subjective dimensions (what individuals anchors believe or know, what kind of evidence they have)—and this is the broad context that serves as the background for our workshop.

INVITED SPEAKERS
Cleo Condoravdi, Stanford University
Alda Mari, Institut Jean Nicod, ENS, CNRS

Abstract Guidelines:
1. Abstracts must be submitted in PDF format with filename PaperTitle.pdf (e.g., Prosodic_Form_and_Discourse_Function.pdf).
2. An abstract must be at most two pages in length (including data and references), on letter sized (8.5 by 11) or A4 page setting with one-inch margins, set in a font no smaller than 11 points. Intersperse data within the main text of the abstract, not on a separate page.
3. Abstracts must be anonymous. Author name(s) must not appear on the abstract or file name. Please include the name and author information in the email of submission.
4. Please submit your abstract by sending it to Matt Teichman: teichman@uchicago.edu
5. All abstracts must be submitted by February 25 at 11:59 PM CST.
6. Submissions are limited to one individual and one joint abstract per author, or two joint abstracts per author.

Important Dates:
Submission deadline: February 25, 2015
Notification: March 1, 2015
Workshop date: April 22, 2015

For questions, please contact us at: teichman at uchicago dot edu
The organizing committee
Anastasia Giannakidou
Chris Kennedy
Matt Teichman
Malte Willer