Topicality

Workshop at the 30th Annual Meeting of the German Linguistics Society DGfS, Bamberg, February 27-29, 2008
organised by Cornelia Endriss (Osnabrück), Stefan Hinterwimmer (Humboldt Universität Berlin) and Sophie Repp(Humboldt Universität Berlin)

Call

Programme

Registration

Arrival

Deutsche Version

For any further information, please visit the official webpage of the 30th DGfS Annual Meeting.


Call This workshop investigates interpretative and formal aspects of topicality in individual languages as well as cross-linguistically. Its goal is both a more precise and a more comprehensive understanding of the notion of topicality.

According to the probably most current view, topics are what a sentence is about (= aboutness). However, the notion of topic is many-facetted and topics have been suggested to have other interpretative functions as well. For instance, they are thought to serve as discourse addresses. Furthermore, they often have been associated with discourse givenness but since indefinites in many languages can also occur in topic positions this latter view must be questioned. In addition to the aspects just mentioned there are interpretative functions which have been associated with topicality that are not directly topical in the sense of aboutness such as frame setting or the structuring of contrastive discourses. On top of that, it has been argued that topicality can have truth-conditional effects, e.g. in the interpretation of indefinites and quantificational adverbs.

Topics are marked with different means in different languages: syntactically, prosodically, with morphological markers. Topic markers and topic marking constructions have also been observed to serve uses other than topic marking. The Japanese marker wa, for instance, or the Korean marker nun can also mark contrastiveness. Left dislocation in German shares this characteristic. Furthermore, in many languages - e.g. Tagalog, Vietnamese, Turkish - a topic marker is used to mark the antecedent of conditionals, which suggests that this antecedent might be topical. Finally, topic markers cannot only occur in matrix clauses but also in embedded clauses. Since this is unexpected from the point of view of discourse organisation the precise interpretation of such "topic-marked" structures calls for closer inspection.

Building on these observations, the workshop aims at exploring the various ingredients in the interpretation of topicality. Part of this is an investigation of the means of topic marking and the relation between topicality and other functions of topic markers, which cannot be interpreted as (directly) topical, such as the mentioned contrastiveness.

Registration Please register on the official registration webpage of the 30th DGfS Annual Meeting (which currently is only available in German, for a translation guide see below).

Early registration: before January 31th 2008:

• DGfS members with income: 25 Euros, without income 15 Euros
• Non-members with income: 45 Euros, without income 20 Euros

Late registration (from February 1st 2008):

• DGfS members with income: 30 Euros, without income 20 Euros
• Non-members with income: 50 Euros, without income 25 Euros

If you're coming from abroad you can register early and pay the lower fee on site in Bamberg.

You can also register for the conference dinner (Geselliger Abend) on Wednesday February 27th, 7 p.m., cost: 25 Euros, buffet and drinks included (tick the box above the “Anmelden” button.

Press the “Anmelden” button once you've entered all your information.

Translation guide for the registration page:

Vorname: first name
Nachname: surname
Universität: university
Adresse: address
PLZ: zip code
Wohnort: city/town
Telefon: telephone