<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/><title></title></head><body><p style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;color:#000000;text-decoration:none">Dear Claire:</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;color:#000000;text-decoration:none">Can you please bring this into circulation via your histling program. Thanks a lot!</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;color:#000000;text-decoration:none">Werner</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px;"><strong>Call for papers – Workshop participation – WS Abstract:</strong></p>
<p style="margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px;"><strong>‘Thetic- vs. Categorical: </strong>D<strong>istinctions and commonalities.’</strong></p>
<p style="margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px;"><strong> </strong></p>
<p style="margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px;"><strong>WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION</strong></p>
<p style="margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px;">The workshop aims at closely investigating <em>thetic</em> vs. <em>categorical</em> sentence types and their relation between meaning and form well as their distributional behavior in sundry languages. The thetic-categorical distinction relates to the notions of <em>simple</em> and <em>double judgment</em> introduced by the 19<sup>th</sup> century logicians Brentano and Marty. Simple and double judgment play a role in predication logic. Pertinent sentence types have occasionally been in the center of attention by linguists trying to relate them to modern and better studied notions (analytic vs. synthetic, individual vs. stage level, habitual, generic, a.s by Sasse, Ladusaw, Kuroda, Maienborn, Leiss, among others). Respective sentence types like German <em>Es sind/gibt/hat KÜHE im Gar­ten ‘There are cows in the garden’ – AUF­tritt MAC­BETH </em>(with stage location)<em> ‘Enters Macbeth</em>’ have in common that they are used as text starters. By common definition, true text starters are sentences that do not presuppose a precontext, nor are they part of coherent dialogues (Harweg 1968). In more syntactic terms, the sentential prefield (SpecCP) hosting topical material remains empty. By contrast, the very same sentences lose their text-incipient status as soon as, e.g. in German and Dutch, a modal discourse particle/MP (or, more generally, an attitudinal operator) is selected. See the stage direction <em>AUFtritt eben</em><sub>MP</sub><em> MACBETH. </em>A major constraint for thetic sentences is that in German (and Dutch), MPs as well as other origo indexations cannot appear. Compare [<sub>COMMON GROUND/ TOPIC ABOUT</sub> <em>Es sind <u>eben</u> Kühe auf unserem Rasen </em>‘There are cows on our lawn<u> right now/as you know</u>’ as opposed to [<sub>EXCLANATIVE </sub><em>Es sind (*eben) Kühe auf unserem Rasen</em>] ‘There are cows on our lawn, surprise/dismay’. Notice the latter with its non-at issue mirative speech act status.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px;"><strong><em> </em></strong></p>
<p style="margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px;"><strong>INTRODUCING DISCUSSION AND AIMS</strong></p>
<p style="margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px;">The recent decades are marked with a considerable reticence with respect to the study of the encoding of theticity. In languages such as German and Japanese, a sentence with attitudinal adverbials and similar modal and speech act/origo indexations cannot be used as a stage direction for a drama script since the German modal particle <em>eben </em>entails a common discourse ground with a topic(-about) that the communicators had reached before. The two types of sentences, those with and without a precontext, run under the terminology of <em>categorical sentence </em>(with a topic) vs. <em>thetic sentence </em>(no topic, true text starters). As to these, Kuroda has claimed that Japanese has morphological means to unambiguously distinguish thetic from categorical sentences: thetics are marked by the suf­fix <em>–ga </em>for indefinite nominative DP, whereas the suffix for categorical status is <em>–wa, </em>which is also used to mark topicality (in the sense of the discourse opposition<em> thema-rhema</em>). German, in contrast to Japanese, has no morphological means to signal discourse status or theticity.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px;"> Other sentential types, however, seem to be subject to similar constraints, and relations to the thetic-categorical distinction have been drawn, among which with similar oppositional pairs. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px;"><strong> </strong></p>
<p style="margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px;"><strong>CALL FOR PAPERS</strong></p>
<p style="margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px;">Our call for papers is directed to those who pursue the topic along lines of the WS goals as sketched above. Empirical material covering non-European languages is highly welcome. Please approach the organizer or anyone of the program committee and, preferably, send along a (preliminary version of your) short abstract describing your contribution.</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px;"><strong>Organizer</strong> <span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;color:#000000;text-decoration:none"><br /></span> Werner Abraham (Vienna University, Ludwig Maximilian University Munich) werner.abraham.lmu.de)</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px;"><strong>Program committee</strong> <span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;color:#000000;text-decoration:none"><br /></span> Werner Abraham (Vienna, Munich), Elisabeth Leiss (Munich), Shin Tanaka (Tokyo), Yasuhiro Fujinawa (Tokyo)</p>
<p style="margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px;"><strong>Calender</strong></p>
<p style="margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px;"><strong>November 5, 2017:</strong> Deadline for the submission of the short abstract. Abstracts will be evaluated by the convenors, and selected abstracts will accompany the workshop proposal. We will notify you of inclusion in the workshop proposal when we submit it on November 15<sup>th</sup>. </p>
<p style="margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px;">----------------------------------------------</p>
<p style="margin: 0px;">Prof.em.Mag.Dr. Werner Abraham</p>
<p style="margin: 0px;">Universität Wien, Allg. Sprachwissenschaft</p>
<p style="margin: 0px;">LM-Universität München, Germanistische Linguistik</p>
<p style="margin: 0px;">Lindwurmstr. 120c</p>
<p style="margin: 0px;">D-80337 München</p>
<p style="margin: 0px;">+49-(0)89-76996924</p>
<p style="margin: 0px;">Schüttelstraße 37/15</p>
<p style="margin: 0px;">A-1020 Wien</p>
<p style="margin: 0px;">+43-680-2321876</p>
<p style="margin: 0px;"> </p>
<p style="margin: 0px;"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;color:#000000;text-decoration:none"> </span></p></body></html>