WITH A FOCUS ON SPEECH ACTS AND SENTENCE TYPES
The International Summer School will welcome up to 20 advanced international students working on (or interested in) diachronic aspects of grammar and semantics/pragmatics, with a special focus on the interfaces between morphosyntax, semantics and pragmatics. Participants should have a background in diachronic syntax and/or semantics/pragmatics, preferably of Romance and Germanic languages. We offer three main theoretical courses, a two-week course on linguistic methods, a practical activity, and poster presentations by students.
Program
The courses will be offered by six invited lecturers and two researchers from the University of Göttingen.
The first theoretical course will consist of three parts. Part 1 of the course will offer a critical survey of contemporary semantic and pragmatic analyses of speech acts. In particular, the nature of "social acts" will be investigated such as come about by illocutionary acts. Part 2 will investigate the hypothesis that speech acts are proposals to establish a contract between the speakers. Starting from current common ground models such as the Table Theory it will be argued that a successful speech act consists of (a) a proposal by the speaker and (b) an agreement by the addressee. Part 3 will explore the consequences of the model for the pragmatics/syntax interface and for language change.
A second theoretical course will concentrate on theoretical issues regarding the morphosyntax and semantics of sentence mood and clause typing in diachrony. It will mainly focus on data concerning the development from (Vulgar) Latin to Romance, taking also medieval Romance varieties into consideration. The main topics include basic word order from Latin to Romance, diachronic perspectives on information structure and illocutionary force as well as interface phenomena such as special interpretative flavours added to sentence types and triggered by morphosyntactic means. The participants will thus become familiar with different grammar-theoretical approaches to the interpretation and analysis of language change with respect to these topics.
Apart from these two topics, a third interdisciplinary course will be offered during the first week. This course will discuss the possible connection between diachronic change and langauge acquisition, with a focus on issues such as information structure, gradience/gradualness, frequency, complexity, and the size of rules.
In order to provide the participants with the necessary knowledge about the methods and empirical instruments of historical linguistics, a two-week course will be held on historical and diachronic corpus linguistics and on how to deal with historic linguistic data. This class will introduce students to the use of syntactically annotated ("parsed") corpora for research in diachronic syntax. Methods will be illustrated with two case studies in the history of the Germanic and the Romance languages.
Additionally, participants will conduct a practical activity in the second week. This exercise session will consist of practical work on some concrete issues of language variation and change in Romance languages. The students will be instructed on how to approach research questions by working with (tagged, partially tagged or non-annotated) historical corpora, such as the OVI database of Old Italian, the (Old) French corpus FRANTEXT, the (Old) Spanish corpus CORDE/Corpus del Español and the (Old) Portuguese corpus Tycho Brahe.
Finally, poster presentations by the participants will allow everyone involved to receive important feedback on their research.
To summarize, the following five classes (1,5 hour per day each) will be held, featuring renowned researchers.
- Speech acts in synchrony and diachrony (theory 1). Lecturer: Regine Eckardt
- Sentence types, variation and change (theory 2). Lecturer: Eva-Maria Remberger
- Diachrony and language acquisition (interdisciplinary). Lecturer: Marit Westergaard
- Corpus methods in diachronic linguistics (methods). Lecturers: Anthony Kroch, Emanuela Sanfelici & Beatrice Santorini
- Practical activity: corpus study on a special topic of historical linguistics (exercise). Lecturers: Olga Kellert & Guido Mensching
In addition, there will be poster sessions, enabling participants to present and discuss their work.
The Social Program includes
- Visit to the art exhibition documenta in Kassel (one day exhibition)
- Visit to "Pauliner Church", including the famous historical library
- Guided tour of Göttingen
- Visit to Saline Luisenhall
Confirmed lecturers
Prof. Dr. Regine Eckardt, University of Konstanz
Prof. Dr. Anthony Kroch, University of Pennsylvania
Prof. Dr. Eva-Maria Remberger, University of Vienna
Dr. Emanuela Sanfelici, University of Frankfurt
Dr. Beatrice Santorini, University of Pennsylvania
Prof. Dr. Marit Westergaard, University of Tromso
ECTS
Participants will be granted 6 ECTS credit points.
Credits in ECTS can only be obtained after the successful completion of the work-load required. Student workload in ECTS consists of the time required to complete all planned learning activities. These include the attendance of lectures, seminars as well as independent and private study, the preparation of the poster, and so forth.
Location
The Summer School will take place at the historical Pauliner Church, which is host to the Göttingen State and University Library in the City of Göttingen. Map of the area
Fees & Funding
Participation is free of charge for the selected candidates.
Due to funding by the University of Göttingen the Summer School will be able to offer travel grants for international participants from cooperating institutions. The travel grants are paid as fixed country-specific travel allowances.
The Summer School also provides free accommodation in double rooms for the selected international participants from cooperating institutions.
All other individual costs related to the participation in the summer school (entrance fees on excursions, food, etc.) have to be covered by the participants themselves (or by their respective home institutions).
Participation is also possible on a self-paying basis. Please note, that an application is also necessary in such a case.
Application
This Summer School is open to 20 participants. The Summer School addresses advanced BA-, MA- and beginning PhD students working on, or interested in the topic. Participants will be chosen based on their submitted CV and their letters of motivation.
For an application, please submit:
- A CV (one page including a list of publications),
- a short letter of motivation and
- a short abstract of the poster presentation (max. 200 words).
If your application is successful, you will need to prepare a poster presentation introducing your work. Please fill in the online application form (including a CV and a short letter of motivation). After the successful submission of the application you should receive an automatic confirmation via email. The applicants will be informed about the decision of the selection committee by the end of March 2017.
This opportunity has expired. It was originally published here:
http://www.uni-goettingen.de/de/555484.html