(Not-) At-Issueness

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce that we will be Guest Editing a Special Issue of Languages entitled ‘(Not)-At-Issueness’.

The concept of at-issueness revolves around the intuition that the information conveyed by an utterance is segmented into main (at-issue) content and peripheral/background (not-at-issue) content. This distinction has played a key role in understanding various linguistic phenomena, like presupposition (e.g., Karttunen & Peters 1979), apposition (e.g., Potts 2005), epistemic modality (e.g., Gillies & von Fintel 2010), evidentiality (e.g., Murray 2014), speech reports (e.g., Bary & Maier 2021), expressives (Potts 2007), social meaning (Smith et al. 2010), and others. It has also been fruitfully applied beyond language proper; for instance, to gestures (e.g., Ebert & Ebert 2014), pictures (Esipova 2021), emojis (Grosz et al. 2023; Maier 2023), etc. Despite this richness, no uniform theoretical notion of at-issueness has emerged (Koev 2018), with different construals centering on the Question Under Discussion (Simons et al. 2010), common ground negotiation (cf. Farkas & Bruce 2010), and discourse coherence (Hunter & Asher 2016).

To further advance the debate, we particularly welcome contributions that address the following topics:

- Theoretical work on the concept of at-issueness, including its links to familiar phenomena like embedding, projection, anaphora, focus, illocutionary force, and bias, as well as less-studied phenomena like reporting, quotation, and point of view.

- Contributions that explore crosslinguistic variation or less familiar languages, illustrating novel linguistic phenomena that draw contrasts in at-issueness.

- Experimental contributions providing fresh data to address open questions around the concept of at-issueness.

- Analyses of the at-issue status of content beyond language proper, such as pictures, emojis, and gestures.

While the scope of the Special Issue is broadly construed, we expect all contributions to be theoretically grounded, informing and advancing further the concept of at-issueness as understood in current research.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 200 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send this to the Guest Editors (tkoev@scarletmail.rutgers.edu and masha.esipova@nyu.edu) or to the Languages editorial office (languages@mdpi.com). Abstracts will be reviewed by the Guest Editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue, and full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

References

- Bary, C. & E. Maier (2021). The landscape of speech reporting. Semantics and Pragmatics 14(8): 1–54.

- Ebert, C. & Ch. Ebert (2014). Gestures, demonstratives, and the attributive/referential distinction. Talk given at Semantics and Philosophy in Europe (SPE 7).

- Esipova, M. (2021). On not-at-issueness in pictures. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 6(1), 83.

- Farkas, D. & K. Bruce (2010). On reacting to assertions and polar questions. Journal of Semantics 27: 81–118.

- Gillies, A. & K. von Fintel (2010). Must … stay … strong!. Natural Language Semantics 18(4): 351–383.

- Grosz, P., G. Greenberg, Ch. De Leon, and E. Kaiser (2023). A semantics of face emoji in discourse. Linguistics and Philosophy 46: 905–957. 

- Hunter, J. & N. Asher (2016). Shapes of conversation and at-issue content. Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 26: 1022–1042.

- Karttunen, L. and S. Peters (1979). Conventional implicature. In: C. Oh and D. Dinneen (eds.): Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 11: Presupposition. New York: Academic Press, pp. 1–56.

- Koev, T. (2018). Notions of at-issueness. Language and Linguistics Compass 12(12): 1–16.

- Maier, E. (2023). Emojis as pictures. Ergo 10: 302–340.

- Murray, S. (2014). Varieties of update. Semantics and Pragmatics 7(2): 1–53.

- Potts, C. (2005). The Logic of Conventional Implicatures. Oxford University Press.

- Potts, C. (2007). The expressive dimension. Theoretical Linguistics 33(2): 165–198.

- Simons, M., J. Tonhauser, D. Beaver, and C. Roberts (2010). What projects and why. Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 20: 309–327.

- Smith, E. A., K. C. Hall, and B. Munson (2010). Bringing semantics to sociophonetics: Social variables and secondary entailments. Laboratory Phonology 1: 121–155.

Dr. Todor Koev
Dr. Maria Esipova
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Languages is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• at-issueness
• semantics and pragmatics
• super linguistics