Workshop description: In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in exploring aspectuality from a diachronic, diatopic, or typological perspective (e.g. Breed et al. 2017, Weber 2017, Kinn et al. 2018). The workshop aims at bringing together researchers with different theoretical backgrounds focusing on aspectuality in Germanic languages. While other Indo-European languages inherited a whole set of grammatical aspect forms, the verbal systems of the early Germanic languages were poorly stocked. With the passage of time, the Germanic languages developed different means to express aspectual functions (e.g. ing-progressive in English, aan-het- and zitten-te-progressive in Dutch, sitter-och- and håller-på-att-progressive in Swedish as well as double perfect constructions in German substandard varieties). 

The broad objective of this workshop is to perform an inventory of aspectual forms in Germanic languages and dialects. The workshop is intended as a forum to compare and discuss the emergence, development, and the areal distribution of aspectual forms on the basis of empirical research. Questions to be discussed include – but are not limited to – the following: 

• How is aspectuality encoded in Germanic languages and dialects, e.g. by means of derivational, inflectional, or syntactic forms?
• How did forms that may indicate aspectuality emerge and develop diachronically?
• Which aspectual meanings are differentiated in individual Germanic languages and which aspectual oppositions can be identified (e.g. habitual, continuous, progressive, or perfective meanings)?
• How are the aspectual meanings intertwined with temporal, modal, or evidential meanings?
• Do the aspectual forms show specific areal distributions? Are there languages or varieties that are more prone to encode aspectuality than others?
• Which empirical methods are suitable to study aspectuality? Which criteria serve to identify particular aspectual functions?

We invite submissions for 20-minute oral presentations (+ 10 minutes discussion) in English.

Please note also: A limited number of travel grants of up to 500 Euro are available for accepted contributions by DGfS members without/with low income.

Keynote speakers:

• Frank Brisard (University of Antwerp, Belgium)
• Torodd Kinn (University of Bergen, Norway)

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References

• Breed, Adri, Frank Brisard & Ben Verhoeven. 2017. Periphrastic Progressive Constructions in Dutch and Afrikaans: A Contrastive Analysis.  Journal of Germanic Linguistics 29(4). 305–378.
• Kinn, Torodd, Kristian Blensenius & Peter Andersson. 2018. Posture, location, and activity in Mainland Scandinavian pseudocoordinations. CogniTextes 18. 1–38.
• Weber, Thilo. 2017. Die TUN-Periphrase im Niederdeutschen. Funktionale und formale Aspekte. Tübingen

Submission Guidelines

Abstracts should not exceed 250 words, and contain a max. number of 5 references.  All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference. 

Organizing Committee

• Dr. habil. Hanna Fischer
• Prof. Melitta Gillmann
• Prof. Mirjam Schmuck

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to mirjam.schmuck{at}fu-berlin.de