The Department of Linguistics at Stanford University will be hosting the 40th meeting of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL40)! This conference will take place virtually from May 13th-15th 2022.
Guillaume Thomas (Faculty) is one of the invited speakers! He will be speaking on "Switch-reference, discourse coherence and centering". Abstract is shared below!
Switch-Reference Discourse Coherence and Centering
Switch Reference (SR) is a family of grammatical devices whose primary function is to indicate whether two linked clauses have coreferential pivots, where the pivot is a prominent argument of some sort. In some languages, in addition to their function of reference tracking, SR markers can be used to indicate whether the events or situations described by the linked clauses differ with respect to some parameter, such as time, place or actuality. This phenomenon is known as non-canonical switch-reference. One of the open questions in studies of SR is whether canonical and non-canonical SR are different manifestations of a single process, whether they are facets of a single phenomenon that are triggered by different configurations, or whether they are different phenomena altogether, with independent syntax and semantics. This talk will discuss the relation between canonical and non-canonical SR in Mbyá. Based on an analysis of a corpus of 760 occurrences of SR markers from Mbyá narratives, we argue that canonical and non-canonical SR marking in Mbyá are different manifestations of a single probabilistic process, from which non-canonical uses of SR markers emerge as less likely outcomes than canonical uses.
We are sure WCCFL40 will be an absolute success and we cannot wait to hear about it!
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