Semantics and Linguistics Theory 22 will be held at the University of Chicago, May 18-20, 2012. We invite submission of abstracts for 30 minute oral presentations (with 10 minute discussion periods) or posters on any topic in natural language semantics.
The abstract submission deadline is January 3, 2012, 11:59pm CST. We expect to make notifications of acceptance in late February.
Abstracts must not exceed two pages in letter-size or A4 paper, including examples and references, with 1 inch margins on all sides and 12 point font size. The abstract should have a clear title but should not identify the author(s). The abstract must be submitted electronically in PDF format. Submissions are limited to 1 individual and 1 joint abstract per author, or 2 joint abstracts per author.
We are using EasyChair for the submission and the review process; the url for abstract submission is:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=salt22
For detailed instructions about EasyChair and the submission process, please visit the conference website:
http://salt22.uchicago.edu
When you submit your abstract, you will be asked to indicate whether you would like it to be considered for a talk, a poster or both.
Please direct inquiries to salt22chicago@gmail.com.
16 October 2011
SALT 22: Call for Papers
Roeper in Bucharest
Tom Roeper writes:
I gave an invited lecture last week on the topic "An Interface Question: does SLI
involve Pragmatic Excess" at the final meeting of the EU-sponsored CLAD
(Cross-linguistic Language Diagnosis) where a number of theoretical and
applied linguists have been developing evaluation materials for language
problems in LIthuanian, Romanian, Italian, German and other languages.
This project grew out of the European COST project which grew out of our own
DELV project.
Cable's paper accepted to the Amsterdam Colloquium
Seth Cable's paper, "Between Tense and Adverbs: Temporal Remoteness in Kikuyu," has been accepted to the 18th annual Amsterdam Colloquium, held on December 19-21 at the University of Amsterdam. For more information, go to Amsterdam Colloquium 2011: Homepage.
Congratulations Seth!
Jason Overfelt speaks at SRG
Jason Overfelt gave a presentation at the S Reading Group meeting last Thursday, October 13th. A title and abstract follow.
Title: Right Roof Economy
Description: In this paper I offer new evidence from the licensing of
null-operator structures in various adjunct clauses as well as scope
shifting effects to support the existence of unbounded,
successive-cyclic rightward movement. The current state of the
analysis provided suggests that the Right Roof Constraint (Ross 1967,
Soames and Perlmutter 1977, McCloskey 1999 i.a.), commonly thought to
limit rightward movement to strictly local applications, can be
reduced to syntactic and interface economy conditions. This in turn
supports a model of grammar in which linearization is determined by
independent principles responsible for mapping syntactic structure to
PF.
Bhatt at Stanford
Rajesh Bhatt presented joint work with Trupti Nisar, of SNDT Women's University, Mumbai, at Stanford on October 7th. A title and abstract follow.
Shadows of Ergativity: Variable Agreement in Kutchi
Kutchi, a western Indo-Aryan language, presents a typologically unusual split ergative system which manifests ergativity at the wrong end of Silverstein's scale (1st Person is Ergative, everything else seems Nominative). Ergativity is manifested in the 1st Person in Kutchi via object agreement and hence this split is not a surface morphological split of the kind analyzed by Deo & Sharma (2006). Handling non-morphological person based splits is challenging: can the abstract case licensed by a head depend upon the person features of the DP receiving the case? We show that the Kutchi system makes sense once we extend our understanding of ergativity to cover the impoverished agreement found with 2/3 subjects in Perfective Transitive environments in Kutchi - object agreement can then be seen as a limiting case of impoverished subject agreement. We also discuss the typological oddness of Kutchi in the context of the proper location of Silverstein's Generalization (nominal versus verbal), and possible diachronic motivations.
UMass at NECPhon
The Fifth meeting of the Northeast Computational Phonology Workshop met on October 15 at Yale and included talks by Kristine Yu (The Learnability of Tones from the Speech Signal) and Robert Staubs (Learning-Based Biases in Quantity-Insensitive Stress). You can learn more at NECPHON 2011.
09 October 2011
Montrul speaks on Friday, gives workshop on Saturday
Silvina Montrul, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will present two programs October 14-15, a guest lecture on Friday and an informal workshop on Saturday. Her visit is co-sponsored by LARC (Language Acquisition Research Center) with The Center for Latin America, Latino, and Caribbean Studies (CLACLS).
All are invited to attend.
Here is the information
Date Friday, October 14, 2011
Title “Attrition or Incomplete Acquisition in Heritage Language Speakers?"
Time 3pm to 5 pm
Location Herter Hall 301
Complete abstract (and poster) at http://www.umass.edu/spanport/
______________________________________________________
Date: Saturday, October 15, 2011
Title: Workshop on trends and future directions in bilingual acquisition
Herter Hall 301
10 am to 3 pm
Description of visit:
Montrul's talk on Friday will address the question in the title with data from Spanish, Hindi, and Romanian. Complete abstract at http://www.umass.edu/spanport/.
Montrul is Professor and Chair in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese and is also in the Department of Linguistics. She is the author of four books on linguistic theory and the acquisition of Spanish, with an emphasis on bilingual and heritage language speakers. She also directs the University Language Academy for Children and the Second Language Acquisition and Bilingualism Lab (SLAB)
Short abstract: What language-internal and language-external factors contribute to the vulnerability of particular grammatical areas in the weaker language of a bilingual? What do different heritage languages have in common at the structural level? What are their differences? Montrul investigates the linguistic competence of heritage speakers in an aspect of the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interface by focusing on knowledge of the morphology for differential object marking (DOM) in these three languages. Experimental evidence points to attrition in Spanish, but incomplete acquisition in Hindi and Romanian. She considers how language internal and language external factors contribute to the degree of intergenerational attrition of the DOM marker in these three languages..
The programs are open to the public. All are invited to attend. For more information, contact Luiz Amaral (amaral@spanport.umass.edu), Tom Roeper (roeper@linguist.umass.edu) or Barbara Pearson (bpearson@research.umass.edu)
Roger Schwarzschild, semantics guru, arrives this week
Angelika Kratzer writes:
It gives me great pleasure to announce the arrival on October 11 of our Fall Semantics Guru:
ROGER SCHWARZSCHILD, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY
http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~tapuz/
Roger will be delivering the colloquium on October 21. It will be about comparatives. He has also agreed to give a more explorative and specialized talk in my seminar on October 18: that talk will be on nouns as eventuality predicates and the mass/count distinction. I will announce the room for the seminar session in a later message: for now, mark your calendar - everyone is most welcome.
The main function of a guru is to enlighten us individually. Roger will be using my office, and I am setting up a schedule for him. Please e-mail me for an appointment with him with your availabilities. Roger has worked on a wide range of topics, including plurals, givenness and focus, comparatives, and measure phrases. He is easy to talk to and you can try out any topic on him.
Lisa Selkirk, Angelika Kratzer and Irene Heim elected Fellows of the LSA
Word has reached WHISC that Lisa Selkirk, Angelika Kratzer and UMass alumnus Irene Heim have been elected fellows of the Linguistic Society of America. A high-placed informant has leaked this portion of a message, reportedly from LSA's Executive Director, Alyson Reed:
On behalf of the LSA Executive Committee, it is my distinct pleasure to
inform you of your nomination and election as a Fellow of the Linguistic
Society of America. The induction ceremony for the 2012 class of Fellows
will take place on Friday, January 6, 2012 at the LSA Annual Meeting in
Portland.
Congratulations Lisa, Angelika and Irene!
New prosody e-mail list
Kristine Yu writes:
I have started a new e-mail list for people interested in prosody for
announcements about meetings, conferences, etc.
You can subscribe at the link at the bottom of the webpage of the
departmental e-mail lists.
http://www.umass.edu/linguist/news/mailer.php
NELS 42 registration open
NELS 24 organizer Will Oxford writes:
We are pleased to announce that online registration for NELS 42 is now open and the preliminary program has been posted on our website:
http://linguistics.utoronto.ca/nels42
Discounted early-bird registration rates are available until October 18.
Special hotel rates are available until October 11; please visit our website
for details.
For those of you who are presenting, we ask that you check the posted
program to ensure that your information is correct.
We look forward to seeing you in Toronto!
02 October 2011
LARC/Acquisition Lab meeting on Monday
LARC/Acquisition Lab will meet on Monday, October 3, in the Partee Room (South College 301) at 5:15. Tracy Conner will present:
The Acquisition of Possessive Marking in African American English: Testing
for Obligatory Genitive 's with N' Ellipsis*
All are welcome!
Generative Linguists of the Old World: Call for papers
The 35th annual GLOW conference will take place March 28-30, 2012 in Potsdam, Germany. The topic of the colloquium is "Context in grammar: a frequent visitor or a regular inhabitant?". Abstracts are invited for 45 minute talks with an additional 15 minutes for discussion, as well as for two poster sessions. The submission deadline is Tuesday, November 15.
In addition to the colloquium, there will also be four thematic workshops happening on Tuesday, March 27 and Saturday, March 31 that are described in separate postings of WHISC.
The abstract deadline is November 15, 23:59 CET. All abstracts (including abstracts for the workshops) must be submitted through EasyChair
. Notifications of acceptance/rejection will be sent out on January 20.
For more information, go to: GLOW 35 @ Potsdam
GLOW Workshop on Empty Categories
Empty categories in syntax: are there any?
Organizers: Gisbert Fanselow and Gereon Müller.
Keynote speaker: to be announced.
Abstract deadline: November 15.
Description: Obviously, there are morphemes that are devoid of semantic content, so that the postulation of morphemes (or words and phrases) that lack a phonological interpretation can be considered a natural move. Indeed, most grammatical models employ elements that are unpronounced. They may already exist in the lexicon, or be created by grammatical processes such as deletion in syntactic movement chains or in contexts of ellipsis. Grammatical models must be explicit about the licensing condition for such unpronounced material.
There is a more restrictive concept of empty elements: he introduction of empty categories into syntactic representations in the Government-and-Binding framework was once considered a major milestone in the development of grammatical theory. Empty categories in this sense are not just syntactic elements that lack a phonological matrix, rather, they have special properties (as compared to pronounced material) that are subject to specific conditions such as the Empty Category Principle of Chomsky (1981). Their postulation promised, e.g., an elegant approach to the locality of movement or crossover phenomena, identifying connections between seemingly unrelated areas such as A-movement, the binding of reflexives, and scopal properties of quantifiers. Extrasyntactic motivation was argued to exist in the form of morphophonological evidence (recall the discussion of wanna contraction) or psycholinguistic results (e.g., the issue of the reactivation of an antecedent at the site of the trace, Nicol 1993). The postulation of empty categories and the modelling of their syntactic properties figured prominently in argumentations for the idea that UG constitutes an abstract formal competence unrelated to other cognitive capacities in a principled way. The discovery of such invisible (inaudible) elements seemed to put linguistics on par with disciplines such as the physics of elementary particles. The inventory of empty categories was quite differentiated: the traces of A- and A-bar movement, head movement traces, PRO, pro, empty expletives, empty operators.
Thirty years later, empty categories in this narrow sense have lost most of their importance in syntactic theory. The shift from a representational to a derivational approach in syntax eliminated the need for a device for encoding transformational history such as traces, and attempts to formulate a satisfactory model for properties specific to empty categories have failed (cf., e.g., Hornstein 1995 for the ECP), which is not surprising on the background of a minimalist approach to grammar.
The purpose of our workshop is an evaluation of empty categories, both in the narrow and the broad sense, as part of the syntactic toolbox, answering questions such as
- What are the substantial differences between approaches working with and without empty categories? To what extent are these differences merely due to overall changes in the grammatical architecture (e.g., derivation vs. representation?)
- how can the phenomena previously captured by models of empty categories (such as common locality aspects for different sorts of descriptive phenomena) explained without them?
- can empty categories be eliminated completely from grammatical theories? What consequences does this have for the abstractness of linguistic representations?
We invite abstracts for 45 + 15 minutes talks. Abstracts are to be submitted via EasyChair. Please consult the abstract guidelines before submitting.
GLOW Workshop on Prosody
Production and perception of prosodically-encoded information structure
Organizers: Frank Kügler and Sabine Zerbian.
Keynote speaker: to be announced.
Deadline: November 15.
Description: In many (though not in all) languages, information-structural context, e.g. focus, influences the prosodic form of an utterance. Information structure may be prosodically encoded by different acoustic parameters, such as the commonly found increase in intensity, duration and fundamental frequency for focus, but also by differences in pitch register scaling of tones or phrasing. The prosodic encoding of information structure may be based on universal aspects of pitch (Gussenhoven 2004) or driven by communication-oriented processes as a deviation from a neutral register/voice (Kügler 2011). Many studies have investigated the prosodic encoding of information structure in a variety of languages, as e.g. presented at last year's GLOW workshop on the phonological marking of focus and topic.
The workshop wants to continue this research by turning to the perceptual relevance of the prosodic encoding of information structure. It is therefore interested in the combination of production and perception studies. It aims at dealing with the questions whether listeners perceive prosodic differences related to information structure and how they decode this information at the interface of phonetics, phonology and semantics/pragmatics. E.g. studies by Wu and Xu (2010) have shown that listeners can reliably point out the "prominent" element in a sentence in a language that marks focus prosodically. Swerts et al. (2002) have shown that Dutch listeners are able to reconstruct previous discourse on the basis of prosodic information. Common experimental tasks used to elicit perception and interpretation data include prominence ratings, context matching, and appropriate judgments.
Particular emphasis will be on work that addresses these issues in lesser studied languages and varieties (including contact varieties and learner varieties) in order to gain insight into the existing variation concerning not only production but also perception of prosodically-encoded information structure and therefore reach at a better understanding of the phenomenon as such.
Core issues are:
- Which prosodic cues to information structure do we find in the languages of the world? Are certain cues more prevalent in one type of language than in another?
- Are prosodic cues to information structure found in production studies perceived and parsed to such an extent that they influence the interpretation of the meaning of a sentence?
- Are gradual changes in prosodic cues to information structure perceived categorically?
- If information structure is encoded by means of different prosodic cues such as F0, duration, intensity or phrasing, do listeners make use of all the cues, or which cues are most important in the perception and interpretation of information structure?
- If in speech production evidence for speaker-specific strategies to prosodically mark information structure is found, how do listeners deal with speaker variation?
- Does information structure have a direct or indirect effect on the phonetic realization of the intonation contour and/or phrasing? Are there further case studies that provide evidence for a communication-oriented approach in the phonetic encoding of information structure?
- What are important methodological issues in the study of perception and interpretation of prosodically-encoded information structure?
We invite abstracts for 30 + 15 minute talks. Abstracts are to be submitted via EasyChair. Please consult the abstract guidelines before submitting.
GLOW Workshop on Real Time Processing
The timing of grammar: experimental and theoretical considerations
Organizers: Harald Clahsen and Claudia Felser.
Keynote speaker: Patrick Sturt (University of Edinburgh).
Deadline: November 15.
Description: This workshop examines the real-time application of grammatical constraints during language processing, and how these interact with other types of constraints such as selectional restrictions, discourse-pragmatic biases, or cognitive resource limitations. Our focus will be on constraints which help determine the interpretation of overt or covert anaphoric elements.
Theoretical linguists have identified a set of grammatical principles or constraints --such as the principles of binding theory, or island constraints-- which are thought to restrict the search for an antecedent for pronouns, or for silent copies of moved constituents. These constraints are known to interact with other types of constraints during language comprehension and production, however, and have also been shown to be violable. The apparent violability of grammatical constraints is often attributed (by linguists) to ''processing factors'' without necessarily being explicit about what exactly these may be. Using timecourse-sensitive experimental methods allows us to gain a better understanding of how grammatical and non-grammatical constraints interact during moment-by-moment language processing, and to examine at what point during processing grammatical constraints are applied, or potentially overridden by other types of constraints.
The workshop will provide a forum for discussing the timing of grammatical constraints from both experimental and theoretical perspectives. Abstracts are invited which may examine any type of anaphoric (or cataphoric) dependency, including movement dependencies. We also welcome contributions that investigate the timecourse of language processing in children, nonnative speakers, or language-impaired populations.
We invite abstracts for 45 + 15 minute talks. Abstracts are to be submitted via EasyChair. Please consult the abstract guidelines before submitting.
GLOW Workshop on Focus
GLOW-Workshop "Association with focus", Potsdam, March 31, 2012
Keynote speaker: David Beaver
Important dates:
Workshop date: March 31, 2012 (Please note the change of date!)
Date of the GLOW colloquium: March 28-30, 2012
Deadline: November 15
Description:
Research on focus has always been linked to research on focus-sensitive elements. One central area of research is concerned with the nature of this sensitivity. Is it semantic, and therefore encoded into the lexical meaning of these elements (Rooth 1985, Jacobs 1983)? Or is it pragmatic (Rooth 1992, 1996, von Fintel 1994)? Or are there different kinds of focus-sensitivity, as proposed in Beaver and Clark (2008)? In the case of pragmatic association with focus, must the particles rely on focus, or can they also associate with alternatives provided by other elements such as e.g. contrastive topics (Krifka 1999)? What role does accenting on the focus-sensitive elements themselves play in interpretation?
The second area of research concerns the meaning contribution of focus-sensitive elements. What meanings, across languages, do focus-sensitive elements contribute? In most cases, the contributed meaning components are non-truth-conditional. What is the nature of these meaning components? If e.g. the prejacent of only and the additive component of also are both presupposed (as suggested e.g. in König 1991), why do the presuppositions said to be triggered by also/even differ from those said to be triggered by only: uttering a sentence with also is not permissible unless its presupposition is already in the Common Ground (the presupposition cannot be accommodated), whereas the presupposition of only is easily, and most often, accommodated; see. e.g. the classification of projective meanings by Tonhauser et al. 2011)? A third area of research concerns the function of these particles in discourse. It has been suggested that the function of some focus-sensitive particles lies in discourse structuring, e.g. by marking an utterance as unexpected, unlikely, or surprising (e.g. Karttunen and Peters 1979 for even, Zeevat 2009 and Beaver and Clark 2008 for only). But whose surprise is marked by these particles? That of the hearer, or that of the speaker? And what does this mean for a more fine-grained model of the Common Ground that keeps track of speaker/hearer commitments?
Questions to be discussed include, but are not limited to, the following:
* What is the inventory of focus-sensitive elements in different languages? In what sense do they function as discourse particles (Thurmair 1989)?
* What is the nature of their association with alternatives? Is there evidence for different classes, as suggested by Beaver and Clark (2008), or evidence for a unified account? Are there cross-linguistic similarities with respect to the class that corresponding elements belong to?
* Do such expressions associate exclusively with focus, or rather with alternatives in general (including alternatives generated by contrastive topics, Krifka 1999)?
* What is the nature of their meaning components? What can we learn about presuppositions / conventional / conversational implicatures by looking at association with focus?
* For those focus-sensitive elements that are said to have a scalar meaning component, what is the nature of these scales?
* What is the discourse function of focus-sensitive elements, and what can we learn from them for a model of the Common Ground?
We invite abstracts for 30 + 10 minutes talks. Abstracts are to be submitted via EasyChair (https://www.easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?conf=glow35). Please consult the abstract guidelines (http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/~glow/submit.html) before submitting.
For more information, please visit http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/~glow/
25 September 2011
SRG events this week: Andrew on Thursday, Gennaro on Saturday
Anisa Schardl writes:
SRG is having a busy week this week! On Thursday, Andrew will be talking
about modality in English double object constructions, at Rajesh's house,
starting around 6:30pm. There will be dinner.
Then, on Saturday, Gennaro Chierchia will be visiting us at Barbara's house
at 10am. Topics of discussion are TBD, but we believe there will be coffee
and bagels.
Food at SRG: We determined last week that we like to have dinner-type food
at SRG. However, since SRG has no budget, we ask that SRG attendees who
intend to eat please bring a small amount of money to pay back the food
buyers. BYO dinner is also perfectly acceptable. Thanks!
Special Lecture in Semantics Seminar on Tuesday
Spanish "algunos" and dependent plurality
Ling Club Interest Meeting: This Thursday
Jeremy Cahill writes:
The first Ling Club meeting is going to be Thursday, 9/29, at 6 in the
linguistics lounge. There'll be pizza.
It won't be particularly long -- we don't have any programming yet,
we're just going to be talking about club ideas, organizational stuff,
and all that. We can talk about better times and sexier spots for
meetings, but only if you show up to this one.
Email me at jccahill@student.umass.edu about pizza preferences and any
topics you want brought up in the meeting. You obviously don't need to
RSVP, but if you do, I'll have a better idea of how much pizza to get
and we won't run out.
To get to the linguistics lounge after hours:
Come in Entrance A (the one on the right if you're looking at South
College from the library) and head upstairs. Turn right at the top of
the stairs. You should already have your animal sacrifice prepared at
this point for safe passage. Take the next set of stairs to the third
floor and go down the hallway. The lounge is at the end, most of the
time.
Some doors might be locked; I'm told they sometimes respond to sweet
nothings whispered into their doorknobs.
If you can't get in, don't know where to go, or find yourself in a
field of poppies instead of the linguistics lounge, my phone number's
857 201 9473. You could also shout really loudly to nobody in
particular. Throwing rocks at windows is discouraged.