Workshop "The building blocks and mortar of meaning II"

3rd to 4th November 2017

Tübingen, Brechtbau, Wilhelmstr. 50, room 215

Organizers

A collaboration of

• Project A1, SFB 833, Tübingen (Sebastian Bücking, Frauke Buscher, Claudia Maienborn)

• Project B4, SFB 732, Stuttgart (Hans Kamp, Tillmann Pross, Antje Roßdeutscher)
• SRF Language and Cognition, Stuttgart (Fabian Bross, Daniel Hole)

Invited Speakers

Louise McNally

Giorgos Spathas

Carla Umbach

Description

The workshop will focus on the question of how conceptual knowledge (as context and world knowledge) interacts with the linguistic system. In particular, we want to address controversies that arise with regard to the structural encoding of semantic and conceptual information. Broadly speaking, one can distinguish between three approaches:

1. Traditional approaches link conceptual resources neither to compositional semantics nor to syntactic configurations (see the traditional Montague grammar and approaches based on it).
2. Conceptual-semantic approaches point to a direct influence of conceptual knowledge on the compositional meaning constitution, without directly reflecting it in the syntax (see two-level semantics as in Bierwisch 1982, Lang & Maienborn 2011, or type compositional logic as in Asher 2011).
3. Structure-oriented approaches link conceptual-semantic knowledge to syntactic configurations (see Distributed Morphology and (Neo-)Constructional Approaches as, for instance, advanced by Borer 2005, Ramchand 2013).

Against this background, the workshop invites contributions which:

- demonstrate the advantages of the respective approaches through case studies, or

- contrast the explanatory potential of the different approaches.

Program

Friday, 3rd November

Saturday, 4th November