Call for Papers: Going Heim!

The UConn Logic group is proud to announce its annual logic workshop. The workshop is organized around that work of a researcher that has had a significant and lasting influence on the field. The talks, invited and selected, will be given by critics or contributors to the field who were influenced by the keynote speakers’s work.

2015 Workshop: Going Heim. Linguistic Meaning Between Structure and Use.

Irene Heim is among the most influential scholars in the study of natural-language semantics and pragmatics. Several of her lasting contributions to the field were contained or foreshadowed in her dissertation “The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases” (UMass Amherst, 1982). There, Heim demonstrated that Montagovian semantics and Chomskyan syntax, two schools of thought which had developed independently and were deemed at cross-purposes by many, could in fact be unified to mutual benefit. Heim’s dissertation is also one of the first fully developed accounts in what would come to be known as dynamic semantics. With this workshop, we will celebrate Heim’s recent 60th birthday and use the occasion to reflect on the transformative nature of her early work, its continued influence over the years since, and the present state and trajectory of the field of formal semantics and pragmatics.

Program

Location: University of Connecticut, Storrs

Date: May 2-3, 2015

Keynote: Irene Heim (MIT)

Confirmed Speakers:

• David Beaver (Texas)
• Simon Charlow (Rutgers)
• Hans Kamp (Stuttgart/Texas)
• Barbara Partee (UMass)
• Thomas Ede Zimmermann (Frankfurt)

Call for papers

In addition to keynote and invited presentations, there will be a limited number of contributed talks (45 minutes + 30 minutes of discussion), with at least one slot reserved for a graduate student presentation. The winner of the graduate student competition will receive free accommodation and a travel subsidy.

We invite contributions that address any topic related to Irene Heim’s dissertation, including but not limited to (in)definiteness, static vs. dynamic approaches, QVE, anaphora, pronouns, donkeys, bishops, and sage plants.

Submissions

If you would like to contribute a talk, please send a 2-3 page abstract to magdalena.kaufmann@uconn.edu. 

Please note in your email if you would like to be considered for the graduate student competition.

Deadline for submissions:  March 23th, 2015