From May 25 to June 6, Rajesh Bhatt, Sakshi Bhatia, Michael Clauss, Jyoti Iyer and Stefan Keine attended the Linguistics Summer School in the Indian Mountains (LISSIM) in Solang, Himachal Pradesh, India. WHISC was fortunate enough to have embedded a reporter in the school, and what follows is a dispatch from our reporter, along with her (or his) photographs.
The 8th edition of LISSIM was organized in Solang, where we woke up to the sight of snow covered peaks and rested to the sound of the gurgling river flowing nearby. In some ways it was very much like the Pioneer valley, but at a higher elevation (2560m, 8400ft.) and with snow in midsummer.
The two week long school had courses by four visiting faculty: former UMass syntax guru Klaus Abels (UCL), who taught a course on sluicing; Rajesh Bhatt, who taught a course on agreement (along with Stefan Keine); Veneeta Dayal (Rutgers), who taught a course on the semantics of questions, and Joachim Sabels (the UCL in Belgium) who taught a course on the typology of wh-questions.
A usual day at the school had us in classes from 9 am to 5 pm (with enticing food served during the breaks). As the end goal of each of these courses was to equip the students with the best possible tools to be able to take a stab at the nature of these phenomena in the various languages spoken by them, the students and faculty would reconvene later in the evening to this effect. With all participants living at the venue itself, this meant that work went on till late in the night and early in the morning, with both faculty and students found to be deep in discussion at all hours. The presence of faculty on-site throughout the school also gave the students multiple opportunities to discuss their ongoing research with them. The location with its breathtaking views was inspiring; the isolated location meant that there were few distractions other than the natural beauty to take us away from our work.
The workshops, for which the students worked in language groups and where the students presented their findings and first analyses of the facts in their languages, enabled all present to have a comparative view of the topics taught in the courses. The languages represented include: Hindi-Urdu, Punjabi, Magahi, Angika, Bangla, Meiteilon, Telugu, Kannada, Nepali, Indian Sign Language, Polish, Russian, and German.
From our large UMass contingent, Jyoti Iyer and Sakshi Bhatia represented the Hindi-Urdu and Punjabi groups for the workshop presentations on Ellipsis and Rhetorical questions in Hindi-Urdu, and Addressee Agreement in Punjabi; and Mike Klaus had the unique honour of representing three language groups at different points in the school! (Follow up with him for further details). Stefan Keine and Rajesh Bhatt made a presentation on the crosslinguistic distribution of the scope-marking construction.
All in all it was a demanding and intensive school which introduced participants to various exciting issues in Syntax and Semantics and laid the basic groundwork for them to carry on further research. The participants are very grateful to Tanmoy Bhattacharya (Delhi University) and Ayesha Kidwai (JNU) for making this happen.
