Language under Uncertainty: Modals, Evidentials, and Conditionals

Kyoto University, Japan: January 21-23, 2005

Speakers frequently make assertions based on partial knowledge, inconclusive evidence, or unreliable sources of information. All languages provide inventories of expressions of uncertainty, of which modals, evidentials and conditionals are typical examples. Both within and across languages, such expressions exhibit great variation in their syntactic and semantic properties, pragmatic conditions on use, and interactions with other grammatical categories such as tenses, discourse particles, and quantifiers. Despite much recent work on their properties and idiosyncrasies, the cross-linguistic study of such expressions is hampered by a lack of agreement on terminological and methodological questions on the one hand, and limitations on the applicability and expressive power of standard logical analysis tools, on the other.
This conference aims to address this situation by bringing together researchers working in areas including (but not limited to):

• the descriptive and typological study of modals, evidentials, and conditionals;
• the syntax and semantics of particular expressions and their interaction with tenses and other grammatical categories;
• the development of new and refined formal analytical tools to meet the needs of linguistic theory.

Submissions due: September 20, 2004