Workshop on Attitudinal meaning in prosody

Workshop at the 46th annual meeting of the DGfS (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft)

Bochum, Feb 28th - Mar 1st, 2024

(organized by Timo Buchholz, Heiko Seeliger & Katharina Zahner-Ritter)

Website Link: https://idsl1.phil-fak.uni-koeln.de/personen/lehrende-a-z/dr-heiko-seeliger/attitudinal-meaning-in-prosody

The attitude a speaker is taking towards what they are saying or towards their interlocutor may influence the prosodic realization of their utterance. Examples include (but are not limited to) attitudes resulting in the prosodic marking of otherwise ambiguous sentences as particular speech acts (e.g., as exclamations, or questions), speech-act-modifying attitudes such as incredulity, doubt, rhetoricity, and/or reluctance for instance for questions, sarcasm and irony, and, more generally, a speaker's emotions. Independently of the issue if phenomena of attitudinal stance are extra-grammatical (e.g., emotions) or grammatical (e.g., question prosody), they all clearly affect the meaning that is conveyed by the speaker. We hypothesize that it is a strong cross-linguistic tendency that attitudinal meaning can be encoded in prosody, and that listeners of different languages employ different strategies to decode and interpret prosodic cues to attitude.

Our workshop aims to discuss the following questions:

• Which prosodic cues (intonation, rhythm, intensity, voice quality, etc.) can be used in which ways to encode and decode attitudinal meaning?
• Which aspects of the prosodic marking of attitudinal meaning are obligatory, which are optional (in a given language), and how are available cues weighted?
• How conventionalized are the prosodic expressions of attitudinal meaning in individual languages, and how variable are they typologically?
• How do language learners (L1 and L2) use and interpret attitudinal prosody?

Invited speakers

• Sophie Kutscheid (University of Konstanz)
• Maria del Mar Vanrell (Universitat de les Illes Balears)

Call for contributions

We invite contributions from researchers working on (cross-linguistic aspects of) prosody with interfaces to pragmatics and semantics, also from the perspective of language acquisition. Contributions from early career researchers are particularly welcome.

Submission guidelines

We invite submissions for 20-minute presentations (plus 10-minute discussions). Abstracts should not exceed one A4 page in length, excluding references. Graphs may also be placed on the second page. Submissions should be made as anonymous PDFs on EasyChair. Please name your abstract as follows: [short-title].pdf. Deadline for abstract submissions: September 1st, 2023.

For the final conference booklet, you will have to create a de-anonymized version of your abstract that fits on one page including references and graphs. Please keep this in mind already.

Please note that based on the DGfS regulations, one may not present at more than one workshop at the conference, but being a co-author on more than one presentation is allowed.

Important dates at a glance:

• Abstract submission deadline: September 1st, 2023
• Notification of acceptance: September 15th, 2023
• Workshop:  February 28th - March 1st, 2024, Bochum, Germany

Contact details

• Conference website: 
  • https://idsl1.phil-fak.uni-koeln.de/personen/lehrende-a-z/dr-heiko-seeliger/attitudinal-meaning-in-prosody
• Mail: dgfs24-prosodyattitudes[at]uni-koeln.de
• Organizing committee: 
  • Dr. Timo Buchholz (University of Cologne)
  • Dr. Heiko Seeliger (University of Cologne)
  • JProf. Dr. Katharina Zahner-Ritter (University of Trier)