Psycholing Workshop

Shayne Sloggett writes:

This week we're meeting in the evening to hear from Amanda Rysling and Deniz Ozyildiz, who will be giving practice talks for PhoNE. Amanda will be telling us about "[...] a detection theoretic analysis of sensitivity to lexical restriction", while Deniz will be presenting on "A parallel OT analysis of exceptional stress in Turkish". Each talk should last about 20 minutes, with 10 minutes each for questions and feedback.

We'll meet this Tuesday (March 31) at 7:30pm. As in the past, the meeting will take place in Amanda's and my apartment. Light refreshment will be provided.

Jon Sprouse at Psycholing

Brian Dillon writes:

Jon Sprouse (UConn Linguistics) will be speaking at the Psycholinguistics Workshop on Thursday 10/16, at 3pm, in the N400. Jon is a syntactician and psycholinguist with significant expertise in experimental syntax. He has worked on island effects and anaphoric dependencies from a variety of different angles, and has done ground-breaking work on the collection and interpretation of intuitive judgments in an experimental setting. He will be leading an informal discussion on acceptability judgment methodology, and will share with us some of what he's learned over the years. All are welcome. See you there!

Call for papers: Workshop on Quantifier Scope

Workshop on "Quantifier Scope: Syntactic, Semantic, and Experimental Approaches"

June 12-13, 2014

We invite 6 papers for 30 minutes (plus 10 minutes discussion) that address the topic of Quantifier Scope, either from a syntactic, a semantic, or an experimental approach, or any combination of the previous.

This workshop aims to foster discussion and collaboration among researchers working on quantifier scope, by trying to bring together work from a variety of languages, experimental paradigms, and theoretical perspectives.
Submission guidelines:
Abstracts (2 pages, 12pt font, including references and data) should be emailed to: u.etxeberria at iker.cnrs.fr

Please include title of the proposal, name of the author(s) and affiliation in the body of the email.

Abstract Submission Information:
Abstracts can be submitted from 01-Jan-2014 until 19-Jan-2014.

Deadline for submission: January 19, 2014
Notification of acceptance: March 14, 2014

Invited Speakers (in alphabetical order):
Benjamin Bruening (University of Delaware)
Anastasia Giannakidou (University of Chicago)
Jeffrey Lidz (University of Maryland)
Janina Rado (Goethe Universitat, Frankfurt am Main)
Gregory Scontras (Harvard University)
Benjamin Spector (CNRS, Institut Jean Nicod)
Georges Tsoulas (University of York)
Susi Wurmbrand (University of Connecticut)

Second Call: Conference on Formal Grammar

The 19th Conference on Formal Grammar

Tuebingen, Germany, August 16-17 2014

http://fg.phil.hhu.de/

Collocated with the European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information

Background

FG-2014 is the 19th conference on Formal Grammar, to be held in conjunction with the European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information, which takes place in 2014 in Tuebingen, Germany.

Previous Formal Grammar meetings were held in Barcelona (1995), Prague (1996), Aix-en-Provence (1997), Saarbruecken (1998), Utrecht (1999), Helsinki (2001), Trento (2002), Vienna (2003), Nancy (2004), Edinburgh (2005), Malaga (2006), Dublin (2007), Hamburg (2008), Bordeaux (2009), Copenhagen (2010), Ljubljana (2011), Opole (2012) and Duesseldorf (2013).

Aims and Scope

FG provides a forum for the presentation of new and original research on formal grammar, mathematical linguistics and the application of formal and mathematical methods to the study of natural language. Themes of interest include, but are not limited to,

* formal and computational phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics;

* model-theoretic and proof-theoretic methods in linguistics;

* logical aspects of linguistic structure;

* constraint-based and resource-sensitive approaches to grammar;

* learnability of formal grammar;

* integration of stochastic and symbolic models of grammar;

* foundational, methodological and architectural issues in grammar and linguistics;

* mathematical foundations of statistical approaches to linguistic analysis.
Previous conferences in this series have welcomed papers from a wide variety of frameworks.

Submission Details

We invite **electronic** submissions of original, 16-page papers (including references and possible technical appendices).  Authors are encouraged to use the Springer-Verlag LNCS style.

The submission deadline is **February 23 2014**. Papers must be submitted electronically at https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=fg2014

Papers should report original work which was not presented in other conferences. However, simultaneous submission is allowed, provided that the authors indicate other conferences to which the work was submitted in a footnote. Note that accepted papers can only be presented in one of the venues.

Submissions will be reviewed anonymously by at least three reviewers. Accepted papers will be published as a volume in the Springer LNCS series, under the FoLLI subline, either separately or jointly with the papers from FG-2015, depending on the number of accepted papers.

Important Dates

* February 23, 2014: Deadline for paper submission

* April 20, 2014: Notification of acceptance

* June 1, 2014: Camera ready copies due

* August 16-17, 2014: Conference dates

Steven Foley talks on Friday, Nov. 15

Steven Foley from NYU will give the following talk at 2:30pm in the Partee Room on Friday, November 15.

Relative Clauses in Georgian

Georgian is notable for exhibiting many relativization strategies.
Relative clauses may contain a wh-phrase, or the complementizer rom,
which occurs in a non-initial position; they may occur directly after
the modified nominal head, extraposed to the right edge of the matrix
clause, or preposed in a correlative construction; the nominal head
may appear inside the relative, outside it, or both. Despite this
variation, I propose that all relative clauses in Georgian are derived
from a single underlying structure, with the relative CP generated as
the complement of D/N (Kayne 1994, Hulsey & Sauerland 2006). The whole
array of relative clauses and their asymmetries are derived through a
combination of an articulated left periphery and movement through
escape hatches provided by Phase extension (Bobaljik & Wurmbrand
2005). Such a unified account challenges analyses of very similar
phenomena in Hindi by Mahajan (2000) and Bhatt (2003).

PsychoSyntax tomorrow at 2:30!

Brian Dillon writes:

We will meet at *2:30 pm* on Monday 4/8 instead of the usual 3pm for Psychosyntax. Amanda Rysling will walk us through a very interesting (and provocative!) paper by Lisa Pearl and Jon Sprouse, as well as talk about how this work might relate tot he presence of syntactic satiation effects that arise in certain island violations. The paper she'll present is entitled "Syntactic Islands and Learning Biases: Combining Experimental Syntax and Computational Modeling to Investigate the Language Acquisition Problem." (KBJ: the article has some things in it that aren't in the title.) The paper can be found here.

PsychoSyntax meets tomorrow

Brian Dillon writes:

Psychosyntax will be meeting this Monday, 3/25, at 3pm in the Partee room. This week Stefan Keine will be presenting joint work with Rajesh on 'Verb clusters and the semantics of head movement.'  You can find an abstract here.

PsychoSyntax meeting

Brian Dillon writes:

We'll be meeting again this Monday, 3/11, at 3pm in the Partee Room,  like usual! This week, Shayne and I will present Mauner and Koenig's  (2000) article, "Linguistic vs. Conceptual Sources of Implicit Agents in
Sentence Comprehension" (You may find the paper here:).

After discussing the findings in that paper, Shayne will present some pilot data he's collected and thoughts on follow-up experiments... it'd be great if you could come and give feedback on the topic!

Special PsychoSyntax event on Friday

Brian Dillon writes:

We'll be having a special PsychoSyntax event next Friday (2/15). Abhijit Debnath will join us and talk about his work on the "Minimal Agent-Predicate" preference in sentence comprehension and present some processing experiments in Bangla. See the attached abstract from this years WCCFL. We'll meet at 3:30pm in Partee 301 (the empty colloq slot).