PQs workshop (BCL 2024)

We are happy to announce that our workshop Polar (yes/no) questions: form, meaning and more has been accepted to The Biennial of Czech Linguistics. The Biennial 2024 is the first edition of a new conference taking place at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University on September 18-20, 2024. The concept of the conference builds on the model applied at the European level (the conference of Societas Linguistica Europaea) or in Germany (the conference of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft).

Here you find more information about our workshop (CfP, general description, etc.) and the conference. In case of any questions contact us at mariia.razguliaeva.1@hu-berlin.de or onoevam@ff.cuni.cz.

Workshop description

This panel aims to bring together researchers who work on forms, meanings, and functions of polar questions (PQs) in their intra- and cross-linguistic variability. We invite a diverse range of submissions that draw upon theoretical observations, experimental results, corpus research, and other relevant perspectives. The goal is to establish a productive dialog between different approaches and gain new insights into the nature of PQs. It is planned to address the following research questions (the list is not exhaustive):

1) How do forms of PQs map to various facets of their meanings across languages?

2) Which contexts can be considered natural for certain PQ types?

3) How can the meaning of PQs be formalized and what predictions emerge from certain formalizations?

4) How are PQs processed by speakers, as well as during language acquisition and/or learning?

Invited speaker

We are delighted to announce the invited speaker for our workshop - Tue Trinh, a senior researcher in the ERC project Speech Acts in Grammar and Discourse (SPAGAD) / Research Area 4 'Semantics & Pragmatics' at the Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft in Berlin. Tue works on many fascinating topics in syntax, semantics and pragmatics and, luckily for us, contributes greatly to the polar questions discussion. In some of the recent works, Tue explores a relation between NPIs and epistemic bias (Trinh 2023) or describes the differences between Vietnamese and English polar questions (Trinh 2024). The topic of the talk will be provided soon.

Call for papers

Here is a summarized version of the call, for more visit the Biennial 2024 Call

• Deadline: March 25, 2024
• Platform: OpenReview (please register before submitting), the Biennial OpenReview page
• Template: here
• Our panel number: 16
• One person can submit at most 3 abstracts to 2 workshops
• All abstracts must be anonymous and in the pdf format