The workshop "Correlating possibilities" is a satellite workshop of the OASIS 2 conference and will be held in Nantes on October 14-15 2019. The workshop is sponsored by the Laboratoire de Linguistique de Nantes (UMR 6310), the Université de Nantes, the Université Bretagne-Loire and Nantes Métropole.
The program is available here.
Venue: Université de Nantes, Bâtiment Censive, room C248
How to get there: By tramway - Line 2, Facultés stop
Invited speakers:
Ana Arregui, University of Massachusetts - Amherst
Cleo Condoravdi, Stanford University
Fabio Del Prete, CLLE (CNRS)
Dilip Ninan, Tufts University
Description:
We can make use of the notion of a possible world to describe a way in which things might be, but there are different ways of going about this that reflect different ideas about how to consider possible worlds. At one extreme, each possible world is totally encapsulated. It has its own individuals inhabiting it; it is associated with its own time line. At the other extreme, the same individual can exist in different possible worlds, and one can use the same time line to situate events in different possible worlds. Then one can imagine intermediate positions – for example, two worlds could literally share a portion of history until a certain point.
In this workshop, we are interested in contributions that concern the choice between these views, and in particular that concern their implications for compositional semantics. Which of these views is most appropriate when it comes to describing phenomena of natural language? What kinds of criteria, if any, do we use when it comes to treating different parts of different worlds as counterparts? If counterpart relations play a role in the meaning of a sentence, then what part of the compositional semantics introduces them? We are also interested in related questions. Is there any advantage to generalizing the view that expressions refer to world-bound individuals and assuming that they refer moreover to temporal stages of world-bound individuals? And do alternative notions of possibilities do away with these kinds of issues in an enlightening way?
Call for submissions:
We invite abstracts for 45-minute talks to complement those of the invited speakers and participating members of the OASIS international research network. Abstracts should be submitted as pdf files via the Easy Chair link https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=oasis2workshop. We will also consider poster presentations, so please indicate if you are willing to present your proposed contribution as a poster.
Abstracts should be single spaced and in 12 point font. They should not indicate the authors’ names and should not exceed 2 single-spaced A4 (or letter size) pages.
The deadline for abstract submission has been extended until 11:59pm GMT on June 17, 2019. Notification of acceptance will be communicated in July.
Contact: orin.percus(at)univ-nantes.fr