CALL FOR PAPERS

Formal and experimental approaches to discourse particles and modal adverbs
http://www.uni-frankfurt.de/fb10/schmitz/esslli2008/
August 4-8, 2008

organised as part of the European Summer School on Logic, Language and Information ESSLLI 2008 (http://www.illc.uva.nl/ESSLLI2008/), 4-15 August, 2008 in Hamburg, Germany

Workshop Organisers:
Hans-Christian Schmitz, schmitz@lingua.uni-frankfurt.de
Henk Zeevat, henk.zeevat@uva.nl

The workshop is organised in cooperation with the SIG Dialogue Systems of the Gesellschaft für Linguististische Datenverarbeitung (GLDV, http://www.gldv.org).

Workshop Purpose and Topics:
Discourse particles and modal adverbs form a borderline case between semantics and pragmatics and so can be the source of new insights in these areas. The use of particles has been connected with discourse relations and other coherence relations, the relation between semantic content and discourse context, especially the mutual knowledge and the common discourse goals of the discourse participants, with expression of speaker beliefs, desires and intentions and with the control of interpretations that go beyond semantic content, i.e. explicatures and implicatures. And, last but not least, particles and modal adverbs can contribute to expressive and other non-truth-conditional aspects of meaning. From the perspective of computational linguistics, these words are a promise, because it would seem that their treatment would help NLP systems to get a better grasp on the intentions of the user in interpretation and to achieve natural and comprehensible output in generation. However, they are also a challenge, because their analysis seems to involve concepts beyond current levels of sophistication. The workshop proposes to collect contributions to the formal description and implementation of discourse particles and modal adverbs. This third edition of workshop will in addition have a focus on the experimental investigation of the use and interpretation of discourse particles and modal adverbs, with a special view to the validation of formal and computational approaches.

The workshop aims to provide a forum for researchers (including advanced PhD students) to present and discuss their work with colleagues and researchers who work in the broad subject of the disciplines relevant for particles and modal adverbs, as represented in ESSLLI.

Submission Details:
Authors are invited to submit an anonymous, extended abstract. Submissions should not exceed 2 pages, including references + a separate ID page with the authors' names, affiliations and email-addresses. Submissions should be in PDF format. Please send your submission electronically to both workshop organisers by the deadline listed below. The submissions will be reviewed by the workshop's programme committee.

Workshop Format:
The workshop is part of ESSLLI and is open to all ESSLLI participants. It will consist of five 90-minute sessions held over five consecutive days in the first week of ESSLLI. There will be 2-3 slots for paper presentation and discussion per session. On the first day the workshop organisers will give an introduction to the topic.

Invited Speakers:
Christopher Potts, Amherst/ Mass.
Robyn Carston, UCL    (Unfortunately, Robyn Carston had to cancel her talk.)

Workshop Programme Committee:
Laura Alonso i Alemany, University of Córdoba, Argentina
Peter Bosch, University of Osnabrück
Regine Eckardt, University of Göttingen
Bart Geurts, University of Nijmegen
Rick Nouwen, University of Utrecht
Antje Rossdeutscher, University of Stuttgart
Hans-Christian Schmitz, University of Frankfurt
Bernhard Schröder, University of Duisburg-Essen
Manfred Stede, University of Potsdam
Henk Zeevat, University of Amsterdam
Thomas Ede Zimmermann, University of Frankfurt

Important Dates:
Submission Deadline: March 8, 2008
Notification: April 21, 2008
Preliminary programme: April 24, 2008
ESSLLI early registration: May 1, 2008
Final papers for proceedings: May 17, 2008
Final programme: June 21, 2008
Workshop dates: August 4-8, 2008

Local Arrangements:
All workshop participants including the presenters will be required to register for ESSLLI. The registration fee for authors presenting a paper will correspond to the early student/workshop speaker registration fee. There will be no reimbursement for travel costs and accommodation.

Further Information about ESSLLI: http://www.illc.uva.nl/ESSLLI2008/