Funny Indefinites

Workshop on Different Kinds of Specificity Across Languages

Berlin, Germany
July 6-7, 2007

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

The workshop aims at bringing together researchers working on theoretical and empirical aspects of specificity. The notion of specificity is an intensively investigated and debated topic and there are many very different conceptions of specificity around: it has been proposed that specificity should be captured by a notion of speaker's reference (Fodor and Sag 1982), that it has to be linked to the notion of presuppositionality or familiarity (Enç 1991), and that it is simply a matter of scope (Quine 1956). These different conceptions have lead to quite diverse formalisations. Furthermore, the interconnection of topicality and specificity has often been addressed (e.g. Cresti 1995), but the role that information structure plays for the notion of specificity is still not well understood.

On the empirical side, there has been intensive research on the detection and examination of specificity markers in different languages. However, what has been less acknowledged so far is the fact that there are vast differences among specificity markers - across languages and within one language. What is usually regarded as specific indefinites is by no means a homogenous class. Different kinds of specific indefinites behave differently in a number of respects: whether they have to be given/familiar or unique, whether some kind of speaker-hearer-asymmetry for referent identification is involved, what scope they take in the context of other quantifiers, negation, attitude verbs, and intensional/modal operators. Little attention has been paid to these unexpected differences so far (but important first steps have been made in Prince 1981, Ionin 2006 on indefinite 'this' vs. 'a certain' or Schwarz 2001, Farkas 2002 on 'some' vs. 'a certain' and others).

This workshop is designed to close these gaps. We aim at bringing different theoretical strands together thus furthering fruitful discussion. We invite talks that further our theoretical understanding of specificity, for instance by discussing differences among specific indefinites within one language as well as by presenting and investigating more of these 'funny indefinites' cross-linguistically. Furthermore, we would like to learn more about the connection of specificity and information structure and topicality in particular.

INVITED SPEAKERS

• Donka Farkas, University of California

• Klaus von Heusinger, University of Stuttgart

• Anastasia Giannakidou, University of Chicago

• Tania Ionin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Paula Menéndez Benito, MIT

• Jason Merchant, University of Chicago

• Yoad Winter, Technion & NIAS

• Jae-Il Yeom, Hongik University

WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS

• Cornelia Endriss, University of Osnabrueck (endriss at uni-potsdam.de)

• Stefan Hinterwimmer, Humboldt University Berlin (stefan.hinterwimmer at rz.hu-berlin.de)

• Manfred Krifka, Humboldt University Berlin (krifka at rz.hu-berlin.de)

• Sophie Repp, Humboldt University Berlin (sophie.repp at rz.hu-berlin.de)

FURTHER INFORMATION

The workshop is organized by project A2 "Quantification and Information Structure" of the SFB 632 "Information Structure" and supported by the Centre for General Linguistics, Typology and Universals Research (ZAS), Berlin.