On September 21–22, 2026, the workshop At-issueness and Commitment: Interfaces and Interactions took place at Goethe University Frankfurt. The workshop was organized as part of CRC 1718 Common Ground, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), and hosted by Project A4 Multimodality, Iconicity and the Common Ground: The Status of Speech and Gesture.
The workshop brought together researchers from semantics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, philosophy of language, and related fields to discuss the relationship between at-issueness and commitment. Both notions play a central role in theories of meaning and discourse, but their relationship remains far from settled. Does at-issue content generally come with stronger speaker commitment? Can at-issueness and commitment come apart? Or should one of the notions ultimately be understood in terms of the other? These questions provided a common thread throughout the two days and connected a wide range of theoretical and empirical work.
The program featured invited talks by Anna Kocher (KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt), Martina Faller (University of Manchester), and Corien Bary (Radboud University Nijmegen), alongside eleven contributed talks and two poster sessions with 21 posters. We were also very pleased to welcome CRC Mercator Fellows Bart Geurts and Manfred Krifka, both of whom contributed talks to the program.
The contributions reflected the breadth of the topic, covering phenomena ranging from presuppositions, appositives, evidentials, and adverbials to questions, irony, metaphor, gestures, and pictorial communication. The program brought together formal semantic and pragmatic analyses with experimental work, corpus studies, commitment logic, facial EMG, and work with language models, and included data from a wide range of languages.
With around 70 registered participants, the workshop grew far beyond what we had initially expected. More importantly, the two days were marked by lively discussions across theoretical and methodological traditions, both during the talks and poster sessions and beyond the scheduled program. The range of perspectives made clear how much there still is to understand about the relationship between at-issueness, commitment, and the common ground, while also showing how productive it can be to bring these research strands into direct conversation.
We would like to thank all speakers, poster presenters, and participants for making the workshop such a stimulating and enjoyable event. We are especially grateful to our invited speakers and to everyone who traveled to Frankfurt to contribute to the discussion.
The workshop was organized by Kathryn Barnes, Cornelia Ebert, Lennart Fritzsche, Ramona Saile, and Britta Stolterfoht as part of CRC 1718 “Common Ground.” We gratefully acknowledge support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), SFB 1718, project number 538184825.
