PLM2015 Thematic session: Interaction among spatial, temporal and inferential domains

Convener: Szymon Grzelak (Institute of Linguistics, Adam Mickiewicz University / Kyoto University)

The aim of this workshop is to bring together scholars working on typologically distant languages in order to further elucidate the ways spatial and temporal categories interact in a variety of domains including conditional and temporal sentences, counterfactuality, modality and aspect. Also, scalarity and paths, intrinsically bound to the linguistic expressions resulting from such space-time mapping will be of interest as well. The work presented by the organizers will focus on Japanese, but we hope to complement our findings with empirical data from other languages.

The following are some of the relevant phenomena in Japanese. The formal noun tokoro (‘place’) has been shown to represent reference points in a variety of interpretative domains, such as space, time and possible worlds (Takubo 2011). Similarly, the temporal noun imagoro (‘at (about) this time’) exhibits scalar structure, playing a role in irrealis and counterfactuality marking (Takubo & Sasaguri 2001). In the domain of conditionals, the sentential connective -tara, can mark not only hypothetical conditions, but can also be used for referring to facts in the past by virtue of mapping between the real world at the utterance time and the world at the time point in the past. Finally, some of the Japanese discourse markers, semantically based on the notions of degree and place, such as gurai or dokoroka, are known to be scalar in nature, yielding ordered sets of objects. This is just an indication of the range of issues that could be covered, which may differ in languages that are typologically distant from Japanese.

We welcome contributions analyzing semantic and pragmatic phenomena from the viewpoint of space-time mapping and/or scalar properties. Example topics include, but are not limited to:

  • temporal functions of conditional sentences;
  • factuality and counterfactuality;
  • conditionals and scalarity (e.g. comparative conditionals);
  • scalarity of discourse markers;
  • temporal/modal interface;
  • scalar paths.

Submission deadline for this session: 31 March 2015 (longer than the general PLM deadline).

Sample bibliography

Arita, S. (2009) Tense and Settledness in Japanese Conditionals. Barbara Pizziconi and Mika Kizu (eds.) Japanese Modality: Exploiting its Scope and Interpretation, pp.117-149. Palgrave Macmillan.

Arita, S. (2012) Doose as an Epistemic Modal Expression. Bjarke Frellesvig, Jieun Kiaer, and Janick Wrona (eds.) Studies in Japanese and Korean Linguistics, pp.1-27. LINCOM Academic Publishers.

Beck, S. (1997). On the semantics of comparative conditionals. Linguistics and Philosophy 20, 229-271.

Dancygier, Barbara (1999) Conditionals and Prediction. Cambridge University Press

Dancygier, Barbara & Eve Sweetser (2005) Mental Spaces in Grammar: Conditional Constructions. Camridge University Press.

Declerck, R. - S. Reed (2001) Conditionals. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Fauconnier, Gilles (1994) Mental Spaces. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fillmore, Charles (1990) Epistemic stance and grammatical form in English conditional sentences. Papers from the Twenty-Sixth Annual Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 137-62.

Grzelak, S. (2013) Pragmaticalization of hedging markers in Japanese. Rocznik Orientalistyczny LXVI z.2, 109-116. PAN.

Kaufmann, Stefan and Yukinori Takubo (2005) Non-veridical uses of Japanese expressions of temporal precedence. In McGloin, Naomi H. and Junko Mori (eds.), Proceedings of the Fifteenth Conference in Japanese/Korean Linguistics (JK 15), 358-369. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

Sweetser, Eve (1990) From etymology to pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Takubo, Y. (2011). Japanese expression of temporal identity: aspectual and counterfactual interpretation of tokoro-da. Proceedings of the Eighteenth Conferencein Japanese/Korean Linguistics (JK 18 ). Stanford: CSLI.

Takubo, Y and J. Sasaguri (2001) Ima no Taioobutu o Dootei suru Imagoro nituite (Imagoro as the Counterpart Identifier of Ima(now)). In: Minami, M. and Y. Sasaki-Alam (eds.) Gengogaku to Nihongo Kyooiku II (Linguistics and Japanese Language Education II): New Directions in Applied Linguistics. Kurosio Publishers, 39-55. Tokyo.