The goal of this workshop is to explore questions about the morpho-syntax, semantics and underlying ontology of words and constructions used to describe dispositions. The central aim of the workshop is to develop a better understanding of how existing and novel insights from different approaches to dispositions can be integrated into a single theory of dispositions and their linguistic descriptions.
https://sites.google.com/site/dispositions2015/home
Invited Speakers
Artemis Alexiadou (Stuttgart)
Elena Castroviejo (Madrid)
Ariel Cohen (Ben Gurion)
Bridget Copley (Paris)
Nora Boneh (Jerusalem)
Hans Kamp (Stuttgart)
Marika Lekakou (Ioannina)
John Maier (Cambridge, TBC)
Christopher Piñón (Lille)
Stephan Schmid (Berlin)
Barbara Vetter (Berlin)
We welcome submissions for a 20 minute talk (followed by 10 minutes of discussion) or a poster on any topic relevant to the goals of the workshop (see below). We particularly welcome contributions addressing the linguistic relevance of philosophical insights on dispositions or the philosophical relevance of linguistic insights on dispositions.
All submitted abstracts should be written in English and be limited to two single-spaced pages, complete with examples and bibliography. All texts should fit within two A4 pages, with 2,54 cm/1-inch margins all around. Each abstract should start with the title (centered) at top, above the main text. Use font size 12 throughout (except for examples), preferably in Times or Times New Roman. The abstract should be camera-ready. Authors may submit at most one individual and one co-authored abstract.
Save your abstract as a PDF. Name your abstract with your last name followed by the suffix pdf (e.g., huang.pdf). Submit your abstract via the EasyChair Conference, online submission system:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=dinl2015
Please leave your name and affiliation out of the abstract. Please indicate whether your abstract is for a talk, a poster or both.
Deadline for submissions: March 1st, 2015
Notification of acceptance: March 31st, 2015
Questions to be addressed
1. What are the truth conditions of dispositional statements?
2. How are these truth conditions determined compositionally?
3. In what ways can dispositions be linguistically expressed?
4. What are linguistic tests for dispositionality?
5. Are there distinct notions of ‘disposition’ between which a linguistic theory of disposition description should distinguish?
6. Among the words that can be used to express dispositionality are nouns, adjectives and verbs. What systematic connections are there between the ways in which different parts of speech do this, in particular between deverbal nouns and adjectives and the underlying verbs?
7. What role do temporal and aspectual sentence constituents play in the verbal expression of dispositions?
8. How do dispositional statements differ from habitual and frequency statements?
9. What relations are there between dispositions and causality?
10. One of the constructions that can be used to describe dispositions are middles. (An example: the German sentence `Dieser Satz liest sich leicht’ (‘This sentence is easy to read’)). Is ‘middle’ a morpho-syntactic or a notional concept? Where do the argument positions of disposition-expressing middles come from? What is the syntax-semantics interface for these constructions?
A more detailed description of the questions the workshop aims to address can be found on the general information page of the workshop:
https://sites.google.com/site/dispositions2015/general-information
