With the scientific support of:
- the TAMEAL ("The interrelation of Tense, Aspect and Modality with Evidentiality in Australian Aboriginal Languages") project (Marie-Curie IRSES project PIRSES-GA-2008-230818-TAMEAL);
- the "Social Cognition and Language: the design resources of grammatical diversity" project (ARC Discovery Project 0878126).
Meeting description:
Modality remains one of the most understudied topics in research on the majority of Indigenous languages. Two primary reasons for this situation are that modal categories are notoriously hard to elicit and that their morphological realisation is often highly heterogeneous. The fact that modality tends to interact in complex ways with other grammatical categories such as tense, aspect and mood further adds to the difficulty of providing a comprehensive account of modality in newly described languages.
In recent years, however, modality has received increased interest from both field researchers and theoretical linguists working on Indigenous languages, especially for languages in the Americas (see e.g. Matthewson et al., 2007; Rullmann et al., 2008; Davis et al., 2009; Faller, forthcoming; and at a recent workshop on this theme held at Leiden University (March 25-26, 2010)). Indigenous languages in Australia and Papua New Guinea are also becoming a major focus of attention, however (see e.g. Rumsey, 2001; Verstraete 2005, 2006; McGregor & Wagner, 2006; ; and ongoing work by members of the TAMEAL project: (http://tameal.linguist.univ-paris-diderot.fr).
The workshop aims to bring together researchers working on modality in Indigenous languages, to build on this emerging research and to indicate new directions for studying modality in the languages of Australia and PNG.
The workshop will specifically address the problems of ‘discovering’ modal categories: How to discuss modality in the field (see e.g. ? How to elicit modality in a systematic way? Secondly, the workshop will tackle the problem of the theoretical/typological identification and study of modal forms. What are the categories most frequently found in the languages of Australia and PNG? What are their semantics and pragmatics? And how do they relate to other grammatical categories?
Although the focus of the workshop is on languages from Australia and Papua New Guinea, more typologically and methodologically/theoretically oriented papers are also invited.
Topics for presentation may include (but are not restricted to):
- The functions of irrealis marking in a particular linguistic area;
- The polysemy of mood and modality markers, and how to treat it at the semantics/pragmatics interface;
- Interactions between modality and other TAM marking in a particular language, or in a crosslinguistic perspective;
- Experience with fieldwork tasks for eliciting modality;
- Patterns and frequency of modal marking in spontaneous speech;
- Historical reconstructions of modal paradigms in a particular linguistic area;
- Typological parallels between individual languages and cross-linguistic observations outside of Australia/PNG;
- Semantic domains of possibility, necessity, intention, desire etc. and their encoding.
Abstracts
Abstracts should be anonymous, no longer than 200 words + 100 words for examples and references and should be submitted through the ALS conference website: http://langfest.anu.edu.au/index.php/als/ALS2011/schedConf/cfp .
Updated Deadline
The deadline for abstract submission is 23 June.
Presenters of abstracts accepted for presentation will be asked to distribute 5-page short versions of their papers among participants of the workshop one week before the conference and the conveners intend the contributions to the workshop to be included in a publication on the workshop’s theme.