Workshop on Tenselessness

Dates: 5^th and 6^th of October 2017

Venue: University of Greenwich, London (UK)

Contact Person: María J. Arche, m.j.arche@greenwich.ac.uk

Call Deadline: 20^th July 2017

https://www.gre.ac.uk/ach/events/tenselessness/home

Tense locates the situation we speak about in time, which is crucial for adequate comprehension. Can a clause or a language be tenseless, then? Infinitives and many languages in the world lack tense indication (e.g., Mandarin Chinese, Salishan Lillooet, Halkomelem, in British Columbia, Algonquian Blackfoot in Alberta, Kalaallisut in Greenland, Guaraní and Ayoreo in Paraguay, Yucatec Maya in Mexico, Navajo in Southern US, or Hausa in West Africa). However, to discern whether such absence signals phonologically null morphemes or absence of Tense altogether is intricate.

AIM of the workshop: to bring together researchers working on so-called tenseless languages and uninflected clauses together to discuss tenselessness:

1) What counts as evidence of a null but present Tense or no Tense at all?

2) How are subject licensing phenomena (e.g., Nominative case) accounted for in the absence of Tense?

3) How is temporal interpretation obtained and acquired in the absence of explicit cues?

4) How does temporal interpretation work in uninflected cases in tensed languages?

Invited speakers

Professor Lisa Matthewson, University of British Columbia

Professor Wolfgang Klein, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

Professor Tim Stowell (University of California, Los Angeles)

Professor Jan-Wouter Zwart, University of Groningen

Call for Papers

We welcome abstracts for 30-minute papers (plus 10 min for discussion) addressing one or more issues about the syntax and semantics of Tense and its morphological null expression and its acquisition. The language of the workshop is English. Abstracts exclusively containing the title of the presentation should be submitted to the workshop address at m.j.arche@greenwich.ac.uk in pdf format. Abstracts should be no longer than two pages, including examples and references, with 2.5 cm margins in 12-point Times, single-spaced.