Agenda

Victoria Escandell-Vidal (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)

"Cross-linguistic variation has been extensively described in the literature for future-tensed sentences, even within a single language family. All Romance languages have temporal readings. Conjectural interpretations, by contrast, are prevalent in Spanish and Portuguese, possible in Italian, infrequent and very restricted in French, and impossible in Catalan; concessive readings are possible only in Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, but not in French and Catalan; only Spanish and Italian seem to have mirative interpretations, which are marginal in some Portuguese varieties, and excluded in Catalan and French. Yet, despite this attested diversity, a strong feeling remains that there is a common core of meaning and that the various interpretations found for each language must be systematically related. 
In this presentation, I will address two sets of questions regarding the simple future in Iberoromance languages: 
1.    Is there a common meaning for all simple futures? If so, how can it be described? 
2.    What is the source of cross-linguistic variation? To what extent can languages differ? Are there limits to possible variation?
I hypothesise that the meaning encoded by the simple future has two layers: i) a core meaning, shared by all languages, and ii) a set of microparameters, allowing each language to make a specific selection of values, which determines and constrains the kind of inferential development allowed in each language. 
An approach in terms of semantic microparameters, I will argue, provides a principled framework for explaining how and where languages differ that restricts the range of variation to a few predictable combinations and accounts for diachronic change."

Victoria Escandell-Vidal is a Professor of Linguistics at the Complutense University of Madrid. Her research delves into various aspects of language structure and meaning around the Grammar/Semantics/Pragmatics interfaces, focusing on interrogative sentences, noun phrases, verb tenses, and copulative predicates. She has also addressed issues related to information structure and evidentiality. From a theoretical standpoint, she contributed to the development of the notion of 'procedural meaning,' with insights into semantic and pragmatic processes and the principles governing them. Her interdisciplinary approach encompasses insights from linguistics, psychology, cognition, and philosophy, offering a comprehensive understanding of inferential processes across languages such as Spanish, English, Italian, Catalan, and French.
Escandell-Vidal has secured funding for 12 national-call research projects, with four projects under her leadership as Principal Investigator. She has published in prestigious international journals and publishing houses, including 12 articles in Q1 journals and 35 articles in the top 8 international publishers according to the SPI ranking. She has received over 40 invitations as a plenary speaker at national and international conferences and was awarded the Émile Lorand Chair (Vrije Universiteit Brussels 2014). She currently serves on the editorial boards of leading international publications and the scientific committees of numerous prestigious conferences. She is the editor-in-chief of the Spanish Journal of Linguistics (RSEL). In 2022 she was elected as a full member of the Linguistics Section of the Academia Europaea.

Scientific head and organizer of the event: Giuliana Giusti