[Histling-l] CfP: Discourse Structure and Narration: A Diachronic View from Germanic

[Dr. phil. Barbara Theresia Maria Bloom]

Dear colleagues,

We are happy to announce our workshop “Discourse Structure and Narration: A 
Diachronic View from Germanic”, which will be held on May 4th & 5th, 2023 in 
Potsdam. This will be a two-day workshop on the diachronic developments of 
grammatical realization of discourse and narrative structure, focusing on 
the patterns exhibited by the Germanic languages. The intent is to publish a 
collected volume with the papers following the workshop.

See the call for papers below for more details.

Yours sincerely,
Barthe Bloom

Call for papers
Characteristic of narratives is the double-layered nature of the structure, 
with on the one hand the descriptive content and on the other hand the 
representation of the content (Chatman 1980), and thus lends itself well for 
shifting viewpoints (Dancygier & Sweetser 2012). This is particularly 
interesting as perspective taking interacts with the use of tense and aspect 
(Fleischmann 1985, Sanders & Van Krieken 2019), but also with the use of 
complement clauses (Verhagen 2005) and the position and integration of 
adverbial clauses (Csipak 2019).
Narratives may be structured around the temporal sequence of events or 
centered on topics, which is reflected in the grammatical devices used to 
link elements to previous discourse and continue the narration (Carroll, Von 
Stutterheim & Nuese 2004). Consequently, a change in narrative structure 
should be correlated with changes in the use and productivity of grammatical 
patterns. Think for example of the changes and variation regarding the 
realization of the preverbal slot(s) in declarative sentences (Axel 2004, 
Frey 2005, Bohnacker & Rosén 2007, Bech & Salvesen 2012, Walkden 2017, 
Larsson & Kinn 2022) or regarding the position of the finite verb 
(Hinterhölzl & Petrova 2010, Los 2012, Demske 2018, Booth & Beck 2021).
How and to which degree changes in grammatical patterns correlate or are 
affected by changes in discourse and narrative structure, how the two layers 
interact with each other and affect each other, and how such issues can be 
operationalized are still understudied. Therefore, we invite papers that 
deal with such issues.

Invited speakers
Jordan Chark, ZAS Berlin
Anna Cichosz, Łódź
Bettelou Los, Edinburgh
Pierre-Yves Modicom, Lyon
Sonja Zeman, Augsburg

Submission guidelines
Abstracts of max. 400 words (excl. references) should be emailed as a 
PDF-file to DiNa.DiaGer at gmail.com by Jan. 30th, 2023. Notification of 
acceptance will be provided by Feb. 27th, 2023. Please indicate whether you 
would be interested in contributing a full paper. Further information on the 
volume will follow upon acceptance or by request.

References
Axel, K. 2004. “The Syntactic Integration of Preposed Adverbial Clauses on 
the German Left Periphery: A Diachronic Perspective.” In The Syntax and 
Semantics of the Left Periphery, ed. by H. Lohnstein & S. Trissler, 23–58. 
Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.
Bohnacker, U. & C. Rosén. 2007. “How to Start a V2 Declarative Clause: 
Transfer of Syntax vs. Information Structure in L2 German.” Nordlyd 34 (3): 
29–56.
Booth, H., and C. Beck. 2021. “Verb-Second and Verb-First in the History of 
Icelandic.” Journal of Historical Syntax 5 (28): 1–53.
Carroll, M., C. Von Stutterheim & R. Nuese. 2011. “The Language and Thought 
Debate: A Psycholinguistic Approach.” Multidisciplinary Approaches to 
Language Production, 183–218.
Chatman, S. 1978. Story and Discourse. Narrative Structure in Fiction and 
Film. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Csipak, E. 2019. “Adverbial Clauses and V3.” Linguistics Vanguard 5: 1–11.
Demske, U. 2018. “Syntax and Discourse Structure: Verb-Final Main Clauses in 
German.” Linguistische Berichte 25: 135–59.
Fleischman, S. 1985. “Discourse Functions of Tense-Aspect Oppositions in 
Narrative: Toward a Theory of Grounding.” Linguistics 23 (6): 851–82.
Hinterhölzl, R. & S. Petrova. 2010. “From V1 to V2 in West Germanic.” Lingua 
120 (2): 315–28.
Larsson, I. & K. Kinn, 2022. “Stability and Change in the C-Domain in 
American Swedish.” Languages 7 (4): 256.
Los, B. 2012. “The Loss of Verb-Second and the Switch from Bounded to 
Unbounded Systems.” In Information Structure and Syntactic Change in the 
History of English, ed. by A. Meurman-Solin, M. J. López-Couso & B. Los, 
21–46. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sanders, J. & K. Van Krieken. 2019. “Traveling through Narrative Time: How 
Tense and Temporal Deixis Guide the Representation of Time and Viewpoint in 
News Narratives.” Cognitive Linguistics 30 (2): 281–304.
Verhagen, A. 2005. Constructions of Intersubjectivity. Discourse, Syntax, 
and Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Walkden, G. 2017. “Language Contact and V3 in Germanic Varieties New and 
Old.” Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 20 (1): 48-81.