Call for paper: Workshop on the Morphological, Syntactic and Semantic Aspects of Dispositions

University of Stuttgart, Germany

25 June – 27 June 2015

https://sites.google.com/site/dispositions2015/

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.

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)

Questions to be addressed by the Workshop:
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?

For a more detailed outline of the Workshop, please consult the Workshop
homepage:

https://sites.google.com/site/dispositions2015/general-information


Call for Papers:
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. 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

Contact: dispositions.workshop@gmail.com