This is the second call for papers for the workshop Events and Event Structure at the Limits of Grammar (EESLiG2020). The new submission deadline is 10 July 2020.

Keynote Speakers: Prof. Hagit Borer (Queen Mary University of London) and Prof. Malka Rappaport Hovav (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

Venue: online

Important Dates:

10 July: new deadline for submission of abstracts

31 July: notification of acceptance

15-16 September: workshop

Description:The idea that the grammar makes reference to events has a long and storied history, going back at least to Aristotle, and revived by the works of Vendler (1967) or Verkuyl (1993). More recently, Borer (2005), Ramchand (2008), and Travis (2010), among others, provide specific empirical arguments (e.g., the different roles of the subject and the object, the impact of case, the use of particles/prefixes/prepositions, etc.) that at least parts of event structure are represented grammatically. In spite of these results, an ongoing tension concerns the scope of the grammar in relation to events. To provide an illustration regarding telicity, some researchers like Rappaport Hovav (2008) wonder what it is that distinguishes verbs like EAT and PUSH, so that the former yields telicity with a certain type of object and the latter do not; on the contrary, Borer (2005) points out that this distinction does not depend on the verbs themselves qua particular entries of our mental dictionary or lexicon, but purely on grammatical structure, and observes that verbs like PUSH do yield telicity when a compatible conceptual scene is provided. A consensus is far from reached in this and other areas of the representation of events.The fundamental question encompassing discussions of this sort is: How much should we attribute to grammatical mechanisms in the encoding of event structure and how much is a function of extragrammatical processes (lexical, pragmatic, or more broadly cognitive)? Answers to questions like this one have been foundational to our understanding of the organization of the grammar itself, the extent to which aspectual and event interpretations are carried by elements of grammar or by words of descriptive category, the difference between grammaticality and acceptability, and the role of arbitrary listedness vs. generative rule-governed behaviours.

This workshop invites the exploration of questions in terms of the phonology and morphology, the syntax-semantics, and also the non-grammatical knowledge required to capture generalizations in the expression of events, in a particular language cross-linguistically. Topics for discussion will include the following:

--Grammatical and extra-grammatical factors in aspectual and event interpretations

--The role of grammar in licensing telicity, durativity, and stativity

--The relation between ‘grammatical’ (viewpoint, outer) and ‘lexical’ (situation, inner) aspect

--Interactions between aspect and arguments, tense, modality

--The nature of cross-linguistic variation in events and event structureWe invite abstracts for presentations on any of the topics described, from any theoretical or experimental perspective.

Please check our website https://sites.google.com/view/eeslig/home for updated information

Organizers: Víctor Acedo-Matellán (Un. of Oxford), Matthew E. Husband (Un. of Oxford), and Arkadiusz Kwapiszewski (Un. of Oxford)