| Time: | March 3 – 5, 2027 |
|---|---|
| Location: Friedrich Schiller University (FSU) in Jena Room: | |
| Lecturer: | Prof. Dr. Daniel Hole, Dr. Alexander Wimmer and Peng Liu |
| Download as iCal: |
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Theoretical and empirical approaches to scalarity
(workshop to be held at the DGfS 2027 in Jena)
Scalar focus particles (ScalFocPs) like ‘even’ and ‘only’ have played a central role in alternative semantics and related fields ever since their development (Jacobs 1983, Rooth 1985, 1992). Their syntax and semantics have been at the center of much recent work on languages other than commonly studied varieties of English (cf. Hole 2013, Sun 2020 on Vietnamese; Quek & Hirsch 2017 on Singaporean English; Hole 2017, 2023, Wimmer 2020, 2022, Yuan 2024 on Chinese; Yip 2024, 2026 on Cantonese, Vietnamese and Yorùbá; Aremu 2025 on Kasem, Kusaal and Yorùbá). Exclusive ScalFocPs like ‘just’ pose at least two compositionality problems. First, they may receive so-called minimal sufficiency (MS) readings:
(1) Just the THOUGHT of food makes me hungry. (Coppock & Beaver 2014)
Under (1)’s MS-reading, which is crucially non-exclusive, as little as the thought of food makes the speaker hungry, not to mention more direct exposure to food. The compositional semantics of MS continues to be under debate (Grosz 2012, Coppock & {Beaver, Lindahl} 2014, Panizza & Sudo 2020, Wimmer 2022; cf. also Mingming Liu 2016, 2017 on exclusive vs. nonexclusive 'jiu' in Chinese).
A second issue is the syntactic disentanglement of ScalFocPs across languages. Chinese exhibits heavy particle doubling (Hole 2004, 2006, 2017, 2023, Sun 2021, Liao & Jheng 2025): the proposition that Old Wang drank tea and nothing else can be expressed as ‘OW only1 teaF only2 drink’. It is not settled whether the two ONLYs just syntactically agree with each other, or whether each makes a semantic contribution of its own, e.g. an exclusive vs. a scalar contribution (Hole 2015, 2017).
Our workshop aims to bring together the latest approaches to the above issues and beyond. It is the second installment in a workshop series connected to the DFG-funded project “Scalarity at the Syntax-Semantics Interface” (SYSSI), at the University of Stuttgart. It will be one in a variety of workshops at the 49th Annual meeting of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS 2027), to be held from March 3 to 5, 2027, at the Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena.
The invited speakers include:
- Yael Greenberg (Bar-Ilan University)
- Magdalena Kaufmann (University of Connecticut)
- Mingming Liu (Tsinghua University Beijing)
We welcome abstracts addressing puzzles including, but not limited to, the following topics:
- the building blocks of scalarity: e.g., the syntactic distribution and compositional interaction of different operators to yield an overall ScalFocP meaning
- empirical approaches to scalarity: psycholinguistics, fieldwork, especially on understudied languages
- the compositional semantics of MS-constructions
- the contribution of ScalFocPs to various constructions, including conditionals.
Abstracts should not exceed two pages, excluding references, and be sent as PDFs to the following address: syssi2025@gmail.com. The submission deadline is August 31, 2026.
Please note that workshop attendants need to sign up for the DGfS 2027 as a whole. Here is the link to the preliminary website: https://www.gw.uni-jena.de/101200/dgfs-2027.