Between You and Me: Local Pronouns Across Modalities

Date: 07-Jun-2010 – 08-Jun-2010
Location: Nijmegen, Netherlands
Contact Person: Martine Zwets
Meeting Email: local.pronouns@gmail.com
Web Site:
http://www.ru.nl/optimalcommunication/events/workshop_history/local_pronouns/local_pronouns/

Call Deadline: 15-Feb-2010

Meeting Description:

All languages in the world have personal pronouns, such as ‘I’ referring to the speaker, ‘you’ referring to the addressee, and ‘she’ referring to another referent. First and second person pronouns are called local pronouns as they refer to the persons in the local context: the speaker and the hearer. Local pronouns thus encode the two key roles in face-to-face communication. Their main usage lies in the direct interaction between the participants in a conversation.

In this workshop we want to discuss research on the distribution, meaning, and use of local pronouns, in the hope that it can give us more insight in how the local communicative context influences grammar. In addition to local pronouns in spoken languages, we are especially interested in contributions dealing with pronouns in sign languages. After all, signed languages appear to be ultimately suited for direct interaction between the signer and the addressee, and have been argued to have rather different pronominal paradigms.

Invited Speakers:
Kearsy Cormier (University College London)
Hotze Rullmann (University of British Columbia)
Anna Siewierska (Lancaster University)
Michael Cysouw (MPI Leipzig)

Call for Papers

We invite authors to submit a one-page abstract to local.pronouns@gmail.com
before February 15, 2010, for a talk of approximately 25 minutes plus 10 minutes discussion.

Topics:
Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to:
– typology of (local) pronouns
– person and/or role shift in sign language
– person and pointing gestures in spoken language
– evidentiality/modality/mood and person
– person and imperatives
– anaphoricity, deixis and person
– (fake) indexical pronouns
– (formal) semantics/pragmatics of (local) pronouns
– number and person

Time and Place
Workshop: June 7-8, 2010
Location: Radboud University Nijmegen
Submission Deadline: February 15, 2010
Notification: March 15, 2010