Incrementality ('adding up to a larger whole', König 1991) can be expressed by English more, German noch/mehr, Hebrew od, Mandarin hai etc. While studies of individual incremental constructions exist, there are still many gaps in their understanding. This workshop aims to fill such gaps (A) by studying how incremental constructions vary syntactically and semantically, both across and within languages, and (B) by trying to integrate insights from two approaches to incrementality, which thus far have not interacted:

• Degree-based approaches (e.g. Greenberg 2010, Thomas 2011), taking incremental constructions to express additive measurements of eventualities and
• Discourse-oriented approaches (e.g. Eckardt 2007, Umbach 2012, Grubic 2018) taking them to be QUD-sensitive, managing the growth of information along discourse-salient dimensions (e.g. event/discourse time).

The workshop is included in the ESSLLI 2024 summer school in Leuven (Belgium). It will be in the first week (29.July - 2. Aug 2024).

Schedule

Monday 29. July	11:00	Yael Greenberg & Carla Umbach	Introduction
	11:15	Guillaume Thomas	Cross-linguistic variation in the expression of incrementality and related functions (joint work with Barend Beekhuizen)
	12:00	Ang Li (zoom)	Alternative comparison in underspecified degree operators
Tuesday 30. July	11:00	Yael Greenberg	Contextual constraints on incrementals: Some more pieces of the puzzle
	11:45	Linmin Zhang & Florence Zhang	Comparative morphemes are additive particles: English -er/more vs. Chinese geng
Wednesday 31. July	11:00	Osamu Sawada	Scale structures of numerical additive particles in Japanese: Their interaction with eventuality and intensionality
	11:45		Poster session
Thursday 1.Aug	11:00	Katja Jasinskaja	Discourse time is real
	11:45	Carla Umbach	The temporal trait of German incremental noch
Friday 2. Aug	11:00	Sigrid Beck	Plural related readings of universals
	11:45	Yael Greenberg & Carla Umbach	Wrap up: what we have learned about incrementals and where to go

Posters
Agnes Bi: Mandarin additive particles yě vs. hái
My Thi Ha: A comparison of incremental interactions and parallel patterns in Cantonese and Vietnamese
Chungmin Lee & Dongsik Lim: Incrementality and even-like particles in Korean
Lena Miashkur: A Unified semantics for variable incremental ešče in Russian
Chen Zhuan: How Mandarin incremental hai saves hyperbolic comparatives
 

The topic of the workshop is closely related to that of the course on Scalarity and additivity in natural language, which is also in the first week. Course participants are welcome.

Here you find the call for papers .

The workshop is organized by Yael Greenberg and Carla Umbach. If you have questions, please contact us.