13 September 2015

Call for papers: Prosody and Information Structure

*Prosody and Information Structure in Stuttgart (PINS)*
March 22-23, 2016

*Aim*

Starting out from the (not uncontroversial) assumption thatinformation-structural categories are universal and definable inabstract interpretive terms, this workshop aims at bringing togetherresearchers interested in the prosodic manifestation ofinformation-structural categories within and across languages, includingboth cross-linguistic comparisons as well as language contact situationsof various kinds (L2, FL, Heritage languages).
The workshop welcomes both semantic-pragmatically oriented as well asprosodically oriented contributions. We particularly invite experimentaland corpus-based studies.

*Important dates*

Deadline for Submission: October 11, 2015

Notification of Acceptance: November 16, 2015

Workshop: March 22-23, 2016

*Invited Speakers*

- Sasha Calhoun (Victoria University of Wellington)

- Elisabeth Delais-Roussarie (LLF CNRS, Université Paris Diderot)

- Caroline Féry (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)

- Michael Wagner (McGill University Montréal) (to be confirmed)

*Call for papers*

We invite the submission of abstracts for oral or poster presentations.Abstracts should be anonymous, in English, and should not exceed onepage (2.5 cm margins, 12pt font size), with an extra page for examples,figures and references. Please submit your abstract as a pdf documentusing EasyChair.

*Info*

http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/events/PINS/index.en.html

*Topics of interest*

Topics include, but are not limited to:

- Recent advances in the theory of information structure

- Which are the information-structural categories that are expressed prosodically in a language (including both L1 and L2 varieties)?

- Is the prosodic marking of information structure interpreted categorically by listeners (in both L1 and L2 varieties)?

- How does rhythm interact with the prosody of information structure?

-Are there prosodic effects which have no pragmatic interpretation? (Forexample: are prenuclear accents optional? Are there cases of deaccentuation which occur for purely phonological, non-meaning-related,reasons?)

- How do the results of production and perception studies on the prosody of information structure find their way into prosodic annotation systems for a language? How important is it that a pitch accent categorization reflects meaning differences?

- How can the results obtained from controlled studies be transferred to corpus data of spontaneous speech?

- What are semantic-pragmatic contexts suitable for the elicitation ofI S-prosody beyond question-answer pairs and/or explicit contrast structures?

- Which distinctions of referential information status (e.g. coreference anaphora, bridging anaphora, deixis, newness of discourse referents) and lexical information status (e.g. word repetition, synonymy, hypernymy, meronymy, discourse-newness of content expressions) are expressed by prosody (including both L1 and L2 varieties)?

- By means of which cues (pitch accents, phrasing) are these categories expressed?

- What kinds of speaker bias can be expressed in positive and negative polar questions, and how is this influenced by prosody?

- What is the role of implicit Questions under Discussion (QUDs) in the determination of information structure, and how can they be used in experimental and corpus linguistics?

- What is the interplay between discourse structure and information structure? What effects does discourse structure have on prosody?

- What is the relationship between at-issueness and prosody? How is not-at-issue material (e.g. appositions or evidentials) realized prosodically?