The linguistic study of questions has a long history. Nevertheless, problems with questions still lack agreed-upon solutions in many respects. Partial movement and copy movement questions are a case in point. Another one is wh-in-situ. While information-seeking questions continue to be in the center of attention, the last few years have seen an enhanced interest in various other types: rhetorical questions, deliberative questions, surprise/disapproval questions, echo questions, emphatic or exclaimed questions etc. Syntactically, languages differ with respect to the formation of information-seeking and non-information-seeking questions. They either require the wh-phrase to be fronted into a sentence-initial position or they need to leave the wh-phrase in its in-situ position. They may depart from this general behavior for some pragmatic reasons. Still, there are some languages which are “in between” since they optionally allow both word order patterns.

This workshop intends to bring together syntacticians and semanticists who work on questions in typologically different languages. The goal is to look for convergence across comparable question types across languages or language families.

Submission Guidelines

Aside from the invited speakers, there will be room for a maximum of 20 papers of 30 minutes to be presented. Abstracts should be maximally 800 words long (excluding references). Notifications of acceptance will be sent by May 31, 2018.

Invited Speakers

• Lisa Lai-Shen Cheng (Universiteit Leiden)
• Hamida Demirdache (Université de Nantes)
• Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine (National University of Singapore)
• Nomi Erteschik-Shir (Ben Gurion University of the Negev)

Contact

Organizing committee

• Josef Bayer
• Georg A. Kaiser
• Katharina Kaiser

All questions about submissions should be emailed to katharina.kaiser@uni-konstanz.de

Homepage

https://www.ling.uni-konstanz.de/fachbereich/aktuelles-und-termine/risq-2018/

Sponsors

This workshop is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) (Research Group FOR-2111 “Questions at the interfaces”).