The workshop is part of the 49th annual meeting of the German linguistic society (DGfS 2027) in Jena, Germany.
At-issueness as a category of linguistic description reflects the intuition that the meaning of an utterance can be partitioned into foregrounded (at-issue) and backgrounded (non-at-issue) contents. To date, the at-issue/non-at-issue divide has been fruitfully linked to the analysis of projection, anaphoric potential and the well-formedness of answers. However, it remains an open question whether this distinction reflects a unified underlying notion or an umbrella term covering several distinct phenomena.
Even though research has established a range of well-documented conventional sources of non-at-issue content---e.g., non-restrictive relative clauses, presuppositions, and expressives---it has also uncovered a variety of factors that may overrule an expression’s conventional (non-)at-issue status. For example, clause-final non-restrictive relative clauses are easier to interpret as contributing at-issue content than clause-medial ones. Similarly, narrow focus marking on the triggering expression may turn an ordinarily non-at-issue presupposition into part of the assertive content. Finally, some operators have been argued to shift certain non-at-issue meanings into the at-issue dimension.
Thus, rather than being purely conventional and monolithic, at-issueness status appears to be a discourse-sensitive, multicausal phenomenon that tracks a variety of properties from syntax, semantics and pragmatics.
In an attempt to unify these factors and to connect at-issueness, as a determinant of propositional anaphora, to research into individual discourse anaphora, Gutzmann (2023) has recently proposed to reduce at-issueness to prominence (von Heusinger & Schumacher 2019). In this workshop, we ask whether reduction attempts like this can be sufficient to explain the full range of at-issueness phenomena or whether, to the contrary, at-issueness should be decomposed into semi-independent categories (cf. Koev 2018). In pursuit of this goal, we invite contributions that present new empirical observations about (non-)at-issueness, novel analyses of phenomena discussed under this label, or theoretical approaches to (non-)at-issueness, addressing, among others, the following sub-questions:
References
The workshop will feature 30 minute sessions (20 min. talks + 10 min. for discussion) in English. All presenters will have to register for the DGfS conference. As per the DGfS requirements, presenters are only allowed to present in one of the workshops, though they may be listed as co-authors on talks presented in other workshops.
More information about the DGfS 2027 can be found here: https://www.gw.uni-jena.de/en/101200/dgfs-2027
The main text of the abstract should not exceed 1 page (Times New Roman, 12pt, 2.5cm margin). References, figures, tables, and glossed examples may be added on an additional page. Please include the names and affiliations of all authors either in the abstract or in the body of the submission email. Please submit your abstract in PDF format to dgfs27-atissueness@ruhr-uni-bochum.de.
Important dates:
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Last update: Jun 24, 2026