Workshop „Conjunctions vs. Contextualizers:
Between Clauses and Discourse Units“

November 2011, 18–19, Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Arts

Organizing Committee

Mirjam Fried, Eva Lehečková

Contact: concon@ff.cuni.cz

The goal of this workshop is to address the poorly understood relationships between conjunctions and contextualizers (or certain types of discourse markers) in various languages. We aim at a close investigation of the grammatical and semantic properties and functions of these expressions, which often show a good degree of overlap between a purely syntactic function of structuring the relations between clauses and a more discourse-based function of structuring utterances in (primarily) spoken interaction.  This complex topic continues to attract serious attention and has been now investigated from various perspectives, but many fundamental questions remain unanswered, especially in the context of cross-linguistic variability.

The questions that the workshop would like to address are:

1. What are the properties shared between conjunctions and contextualizers? What are the relevant features and functions that distinguish them?
2. How can we delimit categorial boundaries between the classes of conjuntions and contextualizers? How can we integrate categorial indeterminacy in the description of these categories?
3. How do languages differ with respect to the distribution and function of conjunctions and contextualizers?
4. How does the evolution of particular expressions influence their meaning and function?

The workshop is open to papers that are based on empirical research, focus on various languages, take into account both written and spoken language, are cognitively and functionally oriented, investigate the topic either from a synchronic or diachronic perspective, including contributions on grammaticalization of conjunctions or contextualizers.

Programme