Call for papers: Linguistic Complexity in the Individual and Society

This conference is associated with the project Linguistic Complexity in the Individual and Society (LCIS; http://www.ntnu.edu/lcis) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim. The goal of LCIS is to study linguistic complexity in three different areas: formal grammar, language acquisition, and sociolinguistics. The groundbreaking part of this project is that it will attempt to combine these different sub-disciplines of modern linguistics. Different methodologies and theoretical perspectives will be useful in order to illuminate complementary aspects of language complexity and thus contribute to deepening our understanding of this phenomenon. A unifying aspect of the research is the use of multilingual data. These data have become increasingly important for linguistic methodologies and theories, but also for public policy makers in the sense that they address consequences of migration and children growing up acquiring parts of multiple languages. 

The present two-day conference on October 15-16, 2015 will feature talks addressing linguistic complexity within the three areas mentioned above: formal grammar, language acquisition, and sociolinguistics. The following speakers have kindly agreed to provide plenary addresses: 

Artemis Alexiadou (University of Stuttgart)

Frans Gregersen (Copenhagen University, Lanchart))

Liliane Haegeman (Ghent University)

Marie Maegaard & Janus Spindler Møller (Copenhagen University, Lanchart) 

Ianthi Tsimpli (University of Reading/Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)

Call for Papers: 

Abstracts are solicited for 20 minute talks plus 10 minutes for questions. Abstracts should be at most 2 pages written in Times New Roman, 12pt font, on A4 or letter paper. Numbered examples should be included in the text and not added separately at the end. 
Abstracts need to be submitted by midnight (CET) on April 24, 2015 via EasyAbs: http://linguistlist.org/easyabs/lcis. 

Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by May 20, 2015.

LabPhon 15

Abby Cohn and Sam Tilsen write:

We are pleased to announce that the 15th Conference on LaboratoryPhonology (LabPhon 15) will be held at Cornell University in Ithaca,NY, in 2016. The overall theme of LabPhon 15 is "Speech Dynamics andPhonological Representation”.

Title: LabPhon 15 - The 15th Conference on Laboratory Phonology

Date: July 13-16, 2016

Place: Cornell University, Ithaca, NY USA

Save the Date

Phonological representations are dynamic, shaped by forces on diverse time scales.  On the timescale of utterances, interactions between perceptual, motoric, and memory-related processes provide constraints on phonological representations. These same processes, embedded in learning systems and dynamic social networks, shape representations on developmental and life-span timescales, and in turn influence sound systems on historical timescales. Laboratory phonology, through its rich quantitative and experimental methodologies, contributes to our understanding of phonological systems by providing insight into the mechanisms from which representations emerge.

Conference themes:

Production dynamics: How are representations constructed andimplemented in speech, and what does articulation reveal about thedynamics of production mechanisms? How do these mechanisms shape representations on longer timescales?

Perceptual dynamics: What forms of perceptual representation dospeaker-hearers use and what are the temporal dynamics of perception? How does the interaction between perception and production constrain phonological systems on life-span and diachronic timescales?

Prosodic organization: What are the mechanisms of prosodicorganization and how do they give rise to cross-linguistic differences? What are the connections between perception and production of prosodic structure?

Lexical dynamics and memory: How do experience and lexical memoryinfluence phonological representations? What are the relations between lexical representation, production, and perception across diverse time scales?

Phonological acquisition and changes over the life-span: What is the nature of early representations and how do they change? How does learning a second-language interact with existing representations?

Social network dynamics: How does the structure of social networks influence phonological representations on diverse timescales? What are the roles of perception and production in relation to social network dynamics?

Contributions to any of these themes or to any other aspects oflaboratory phonology will be welcome. A call for papers will be circulated in the fall of 2015.

Questions can be addressed to LabPhon15@cornell.eduUpdates will appear on http://labphon.org/labphon15

Gaja Jarosz visits the department

Gaja Jarosz will be visiting the department this Thursday and Friday. She’ll give the department colloquium (title and abstract below) on Friday at 3:30 in ILC N400.

Sonority Sequencing Effects in Polish: Defying the Stimulus?

The Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP: Steriade 1982; Selkirk 1984; Clements 1988, 1992) states that syllables with a sonority rise in the transition from the onset to the nucleus are preferred cross-linguistically. Experimental evidence indicates that English speakers exhibit gradient sensitivity to the SSP for onset clusters that are not attested in English (Davidson 2006, 2007; Berent et al. 2007, 2009; Daland et al. 2011). Berent et al. (2007, 2009) show that several lexical statistics of English fail to predict these preferences and suggest that the principle may therefore be innate. However, Daland et al. (2011) show that computational models with the ability to form abstract generalizations on the basis of phonological features and phonological context can detect SSP preferences on the basis of English lexical statistics. In this talk, I explore this controversy using computational and developmental approaches in a language (Polish) with very different sonority sequencing patterns from English. Using computational modeling, I show that a) the lexical statistics of Polish contradict the SSP, b) computational models applied to input estimated from Polish child-directed speech predict reverse-SSP preferences, and c) computational models that encode the SSP straightforwardly predict earlier acquisition of clusters with higher sonority rises. Thus, Polish provides a rare example where predictions of input-based models, even phonologically sophisticated ones, diverge dramatically from predictions expected on the basis of universal principles. I test these predictions by examining the acquisition of onset clusters in Polish. The data come from the spontaneous speech of four typically-developing, monolingual, Polish children aged 1;7-2;6 in the Weist-Jarosz Corpus (Weist and Witkowska-Stadnik 1986; Weist et al. 1984; Jarosz 2010; Jarosz et al. submitted). In conflict with the input-based predictions, the acquisition analyses indicate that development is significantly and gradiently sensitive to the SSP. I discuss the implications for phonological theory.

Dilip Ninan speaks in semantics/philosophy seminar

Seth Cable writes:

I’m writing to let you all know that on Tuesday (March 10th), Dilip Ninan of Tufts University will be providing a special guest lecture to the semantics / philosophy of language seminar. The lecture will be on recent work by Dilip that engages with recent work by others arguing against the existence of special ‘de se’ attitudes and special ‘de se’ readings of propositional attitude sentences. 

This talk will be more on the ‘philosophy of language’ side of things, but will definitely be of interest to all those with an interest in the semantics of propositional attitude sentences, and especially to those interested in the puzzle of ‘de se’ readings. 

The talk is in N400 from 1-3:30.

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

Meghan Armstrong in Leipzig

Meghan Armstrong gave a talk at a session on the prosody and meaning of (non-)canonical questions across languages at the DGfS conference last week in Leipzig. The title of her talk was “The rise-flat-fall contour as an epistemic operator in American English.” You can learn more here.

Barbara and Volodja in California

Barbara writes:

Volodja and I are in California February 20-March 8. I had a meeting February 21 of the Editorial Board of Annual Review of Linguistics in Palo Alto to plan the contents of Volume 3. Reminder to linguists -- Volume 1 has been published, and all of the contents of the inaugural volume are open-access for this first year:

http://www.annualreviews.org/journal/linguistics   

After that, you should be able to get access to both online version and hardcopy through your library; definitely true at UMass.

     Then on February 24, I gave a guest lecture in Sol Feferman & Ivano Caponigro’s Stanford Logic Seminar (Math 391, Phil 391), Formal Semantics of Natural Language: “Naturalizing Montague Grammar with Type-Shifting Principles”. On February 26, Volodja and I were guests of Nuance in Sunnyvale. I gave a talk there for Kathleen Dahlgren’s natural language understanding group (which now includes Ron Kaplan and Ed Stabler and a number of other linguists), “Boolean structure and cross-categorial conjunction in natural language”, and later Volodja and I commented on presentations by group members about their work.

     The halfway point of the trip was a great ride on the Coast Starlight train from San Jose to Los Angeles. In the first week of March, I'll spend some time in the Montague Archives at the UCLA library. On March 6, I’ll give an invited talk for the Syntax and Semantics Colloquium, UCLA: “Montague’s “Linguistic” Work: Motivations, Trajectory, Attitudes”. And on March 7, I’ll give the keynote address for the UCLA/USC Graduate Students Philosophy Conference: “Logic and Language: A History of Ideas and Controversies”. 

Sang-Im at Yale

Sang-Im Lee-Kim gave a talk at the Yale Phonology group last Friday, March 6. The title of her talk was “Neutralization vs. enhancement in sibilant place contrasts: Evidence from phonetic cues and formal bias.” 

Call for papers: Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation

CALL FOR PAPERS

 

The Eleventh International Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation will be held on 21-26 September 2015 in Tbilisi, Georgia. The Programme Committee invites submissions for contributions

on all aspects of language, logic and computation. Work of an interdisciplinary nature is particularly welcome. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

 

 * Algorithmic game theory

           * Computational social choice

 * Constructive, modal and algebraic logic

 * Formal models of multiagent systems

 * Historical linguistics, history of logic

 * Information retrieval, query answer systems

 * Language evolution and learnability

          * Linguistic typology and semantic universals

 * Logic, games, and formal pragmatics

 * Logics for artificial intelligence

 * Natural language syntax, semantics, and pragmatics

 * Natural logic, inference and entailment in natural language

 * Distributional and probabilistic models of information and meaning

 

Authors can submit an abstract of three pages (including references) at the EasyChair conference system here:

 

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=tbillc2015

 

PROGRAMME

 

The programme will include the following invited lectures and tutorials.

 

Tutorials:

 

Logic: Brunella Gerla (University of Insubria)

Language: Lisa Matthewson (University of British Columbia)

Computation: Joel Ouaknine (Oxford University)

 

Invited Lectures:

 

Rajesh Bhatt (University of Massachusetts )

Melvin Fitting (Graduate School and University Center of New York)

Helle Hansen (Delft University of Technology)

George Metcalfe (Bern University)

Sarah Murray (Cornell University)

Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh (Queen Mary, University of London)

 

Workshops

 

There will also be a workshop on “Automata and Coalgebra”, organised by Helle Hansen and Alexandra Silva and a workshop on "How to make things happen in grammar: Encoding Obligatoriness”, organised by Rajesh Bhatt and Vincent Homer. More information will be available on the TbiLLC website: http://www.illc.uva.nl/Tbilisi/Tbilisi2015 .

 

 

PUBLICATION INFORMATION

 

Post-proceedings of the symposium will be published in the LNCS series of Springer.

 

IMPORTANT DATES

 

Submission deadline: 31 March 2015

Notification: 31 May 2015

Final abstracts due: 1 July 2015

Registration deadline: 1 August 2015

Symposium: September 21-26, 2015

 

Programme and submission details can be found at:

 

http://www.illc.uva.nl/Tbilisi/Tbilisi2015/

Call for papers: The Distinction between Implicatures and Presuppositions

Experimental and crosslinguistic evidence for the distinction between implicatures and presuppositions
Berlin, Germany, July 1-3 2015
https://implicaturesandpresuppositions.wordpress.com

** Extended Submission Deadline: March 15th 2015 **

Aim:

Traditionally, research in formal semantics has established a theoretical distinction between presuppositions and implicatures. This traditional view is based on the different behaviour of presuppositions and implicatures in embedding environments, their (non)ability of being cancelled, and the triggering mechanism behind them. Presuppositions, on the one hand, are said to be lexically triggered inferences, which project under negation and other types of embeddings, and are non-cancellable. Implicatures, on the other hand, are claimed to be triggered by certain linguistic structures only in specific contexts, to not project and to be cancellable. This has led to a formal semantic modeling of presuppositions as prerequisites that have to be fulfilled in the context in order for utterances to be felicitously uttered. Implicatures are modeled as inferences which, in certain contexts, enrich the assertive meaning of an utterance.

This traditional view has been challenged by recent research on presuppositions and implicatures. This recent research primarily takes into consideration experimental as well as cross-linguistic data. It paints a more complicated picture and makes a distinction between both types of inferences less clear cut.

The workshop will provide a forum for researchers working on these two phenomena to discuss their latest insights on the basis of empirical data, such as experimental and/or crosslinguistic data.

Invited Talks:

Emmanuel Chemla (ENS Paris)
Danny Fox (MIT)
Jacopo Romoli (University of Ulster)
Judith Tonhauser (Ohio State University)

Organizing Committee:

Nadine Bade (University of Tübingen)
Edgar Onea (University of Göttingen)
Uli Sauerland (ZAS Berlin)
Sonja Tiemann (University of Tübingen)
Malte Zimmermann (University of Potsdam)

Call for Papers

We invite submissions for 30-minute talks plus 10 minutes for discussion. Abstracts must be anonymous, in PDF format, 2 pages (A4 or letter), in a font size no less than 12pt. Please submit abstracts via EasyChair (see link below) no later than March 15^th.

EsayChair Link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=impres1

Relevant topics include, but are not limited, to the following:

• Presuppositions and Implicatures in online processing
• Presuppositions and Implicatures crosslinguistically
• Factors triggering exhaustivity effects
• Differences between different kinds of Presuppositions and Implicatures

Eric Bakovic visits department

Eric Bakovic will be visiting the department Thursday and Friday. He will be giving the department colloquium on Friday at 3:30 in N400. The title of his talk is "Ensuring the proper determination of identity: a model of possible constraints.” An abstract follows.

Some phonological patterns can be described as sufficient identity avoidance, where 'sufficiently identical' means 'necessarily identical with respect to all but some specific feature(s)'. The first part of the talk addresses this question: why are specific features ignored for the purposes of determining sufficient identity? In previous work (Bakovic 2005, Bakovic & Kilpatrick 2006, Pajak & Bakovic 2010, Brooks et al. 2013ab), we have found that patterns of sufficient identity avoidance where a specific feature F is ignored also involve F-assimilation in the same contexts. Direct reference to sufficient identity is thus unnecessary: sufficient identity is indirectly avoided because F-assimilation would otherwise be expected, resulting in total identity. Avoiding sufficient identity without assimilation is the better option, as predicted by the minimal violation property of Optimality Theory. This analysis predicts rather than stipulates the features that will be ignored for the purposes of determining sufficient identity. (Several corollary consequences of the analysis will also be discussed in the talk.) The explanatory value of the analysis, however, is predicated on the absolute non-existence of constraints directly penalizing all-but-F identity, which could be active independently of F-assimilation. The second part of the talk addresses this question: how can such constraints be ruled out formally? I propose a deterministic model of constraint construction and evaluation that results in just the types of constraints necessary for the analysis above. More broadly, the proposed model is intended as a contribution to our formal understanding of what a 'possible constraint' is.

Jyoti Iyer in Syntax Workshop

Jyoti Iyer will be presenting some of her work in the Syntax Workshop on Thursday at 10AM in N451.

Vincent Homer in Leipzig

Vincent Homer is an invited speaker at the session on “Varieties of Positive Polarity Items” at DGfS in Leipzig this week. His talk, entitled “Wide-scope taking PPIs” is on Thursday, March 5. You can learn more here.

Trivial WHISC

In recognition of the high levels of scholarship held by the members of the UMass linguistics community, as well as the recognized prowess in games of trivia that some have earned, WHISC introduces a linguistic trivia question.

The Question:

Who wrote the following passage and when was it written?

Language, as I remarked earlier, is like seeing and hearing in that it can’t be taught or learned. Who has ever seen anybody teach language to a child? Some of you may have experienced how hopeless it is to teach language to children, as has been tried occasionally. I am sure that anybody who has ever had the opportunity to observe a child between the age of two and four was surprised about the sudden use of a word or a word form. We rarely know where the child got it from. The child grabbed it on some occasion or other; and grabbing means creating.  – We thus shouldn’t talk about learning of language by children. If there isn’t any teaching, there isn’t any learning either. What we do with children to lead them towards language is exactly what a gardener does with a seed from which he wants to produce a plant: we provide them with the necessary conditions for growth, namely human society. The gardener doesn’t truly make plants grow. Likewise, we do not teach children how to speak. A flower grows following the laws of nature. In the same way, language is generated in the consciousness of a child following the laws of the mind.

Send your responses to WHISC!

Symposium on Linguistic Inequality on Friday

Linguistic Inequality: Language and Power in the Americas 
March 6, 2015

Cape Cod Lounge, Student Union

Symposium Schedule: 

9:00am-9:15am: Breakfast and Introductions

9:15am-10:45am: Jennifer Leeman, Associate Professor of Spanish Linguistics, George Mason University, “Inequality and the Representation of Latin@s in the Era of School Reform: Accent-Based Discrimination in Arizona”

10:45am-11:00am: Break

11:00am-12:30pm: Nelson Flores, Assistant Professor of Educational Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, “From Social Transformation to Official Antiracism: The Unexamined Whiteness of Bilingual Education”

12:30pm-1:30pm: Lunch

1:30pm-3:00pm: José Del Valle, Professor of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages, City University of New York, “Post-Political Language Policies and the Erasure of Inequality”

UMass at GLOW

The program for GLOW 2015, which will take place in Paris this April, has become available and UMass will be there. Ethan Poole and Stefan Keine will be presenting their paper “Intervention in tough-constructions,” and Coral Hughto, Joe Pater and Robert Staubs will be presenting their paper “Grammatical agent-based modeling of typology.” UMass alumnus Winnie Lechner is presenting his paper with coauthors Spathas, Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou “On deriving the typology of repetition and restitution,” and UMass alumnus Keir Moulton is presenting his paper with Nino Grillo “Mismatching Pseudo-Relatives Describe Event Kinds.” You can learn more here.

Tom Roeper doesn't go to Brazil, but Luiz Amaral does

Tom Roeper writes:

In unrewardingly dramatic fashion,  I managed to fail to get on a plane  because of a nosebleed, supposed to go with Luiz Amaral (UMass Spanish dept) to the first meeting  of Abralin 2015 (the Brazilian LSA) near Indian villages in Belem, deep in the Amazon,.  Then after a heroic effort (in my estimation) to get up at 5AM to deliver my talk by skype, the technology failed, but nonetheless, Luiz managed to very successfully present the powerpoint for me on “Is there a recursion trigger?  Adapting Merge, Search, Label to an Acquisition Model” where we also presented a video made by Anca Sevcenco, just visiting at UMass, of our recent experiments at the Holyoke children’s museum. 

The talk was at  a round table on recursion organized by Marcus Maia, a visitor at UMass, where he presented parsing work on recursion in Karaja.  A talk by Luiz on recursive genitives in Wapachana, another by Uli Sauerland, a UMass visitor (also interrupted by technical problems), and Suzi Lima  on her work on Numerals, were given.  This week Luiz is giving a minicourse on  pedagogical grammars, Suzi is giving a course on Experimental Semantics, but mine on adapting acquisition methods to fieldwork unfortunately won’t happen.

Final Call for Papers: Workshop on Morphological, Syntactic and Semantic Aspects of Dispositions

The goal of this workshop is to explore questions about the
morpho-syntax, semantics and underlying ontology of words and
constructions used to describe dispositions. The central aim of the
workshop is to develop a better understanding of how existing and novel
insights from different approaches to dispositions can be integrated
into a single theory of dispositions and their linguistic descriptions.

Invited Speakers:
Artemis Alexiadou (Stuttgart)
Elena Castroviejo (Madrid)
Ariel Cohen (Ben Gurion)
Bridget Copley (Paris)
Nora Boneh (Jerusalem)
Hans Kamp (Stuttgart)
Marika Lekakou (Ioannina)
John Maier (Cambridge, TBC)
Christopher Piñón (Lille)
Stephan Schmid (Berlin)
Barbara Vetter (Berlin)

Questions to be addressed by the Workshop:
1. What are the truth conditions of dispositional statements?
2. How are these truth conditions determined compositionally?
3. In what ways can dispositions be linguistically expressed?
4. What are linguistic tests for dispositionality?
5. Are there distinct notions of ‘disposition’ between which a
linguistic theory of disposition description should distinguish?
6. Among the words that can be used to express dispositionality are
nouns, adjectives and verbs. What systematic connections are there
between the ways in which different parts of speech do this, in
particular between deverbal nouns and adjectives and the underlying verbs?
7. What role do temporal and aspectual sentence constituents play in the
verbal expression of dispositions?
8. How do dispositional statements differ from habitual and frequency
statements?
9. What relations are there between dispositions and causality?
10. One of the constructions that can be used to describe dispositions
are middles. (An example: the German sentence `Dieser Satz liest sich
leicht’ (‘This sentence is easy to read’)). Is ‘middle’ a
morpho-syntactic or a notional concept? Where do the argument positions
of disposition-expressing middles come from? What is the
syntax-semantics interface for these constructions?

For a more detailed outline of the Workshop, please consult the Workshop
homepage:

https://sites.google.com/site/dispositions2015/general-information

We welcome submissions for a 20 minute talk (followed by 10 minutes of
discussion) or a poster on any topic relevant to the goals of the
workshop. We particularly welcome contributions addressing the
linguistic relevance of philosophical insights on dispositions or the
philosophical relevance of linguistic insights on dispositions.
All submitted abstracts should be written in English and be limited to
two single-spaced pages, complete with examples and bibliography. All
texts should fit within two A4 pages, with 2,54 cm/1-inch margins all
around. Each abstract should start with the title (centered) at top,
above the main text. Use font size 12 throughout (except for examples),
preferably in Times or Times New Roman. The abstract should be
camera-ready. Authors may submit at most one individual and one
co-authored abstract.

Save your abstract as a PDF. Name your abstract with your last name
followed by the suffix pdf (e.g., huang.pdf). Submit your abstract via
the EasyChair Conference, online submission system:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=dinl2015

Please leave your name and affiliation out of the abstract. Please
indicate whether your abstract is for a talk, a poster or both.

Extended Deadline for submissions: March 8, 2015
Notification of acceptance: March 31, 2015

Contact: dispositions.workshop@gmail.com

 

Second Call: BCGL 8

 
CRISSP (KU Leuven) and UiL OTS (Universiteit Utrecht), as part of the joint NWO/FWO project ‘The Syntax of Idioms’, are proud to present the 8th Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics: The grammar of idioms.
 
Workshop description
 
According to the Fregean principle of compositionality, the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its parts and the rules used to combine them. This principle is flouted in the case of idioms (cf. Katz & Postal 1963; Fraser 1970; Katz 1973; Chomsky 1980; Machonis 1985; Schenk 1994; Grégoire 2009; among others). Every language contains idiomatic expressions which, by definition, denote a meaning that is not simply derivable from (the combination of) the meanings of the individual lexical items of that expression. A canonical example is kick the bucket, the meaning of which has nothing to do with either kicking or buckets; it simply means ‘to die’. The existence of such expressions within natural language gives rise to many questions which have puzzled linguists for years, such as how these phrases are formed syntactically, whether they are restricted to certain structural domains, or how it is that we are able to deduce the idiomatic interpretation of such phrases despite there being no clues as to their meanings within any of the individual lexical items that comprise these expressions.    
The purpose of this workshop is to discuss and explore the phenomenon of idioms with the aim of gaining better theoretical and empirical insights into how such expressions are able to occur within natural language, and what sorts of rules of language they are governed by. More specifically, issues that we would like to see addressed at this workshop include, but are not limited to, the following: 
 
Syntax

• The “size” and building blocks of idioms: Is there a size limitation to idioms? That is, aside from verbs and their arguments, can idioms be comprised of any other syntactic material? Can they also be built from tense, modality, aspect, or passive voice, for instance, or material from the CP domain? Are there nominal, adjectival or prepositional idiomatic expressions besides the more familiar verbal/clausal ones? What implications might this have for the theory of idiomatic constructions (cf. Chomsky 1980, 1981; Marantz 1984; McGinnis 2002; Svenonius 2005; Hoeksema 2010; Harwood 2013, 2014)?
• The opacity and transparency of idioms: How do opacity and compositionality interact in idioms? Are they completely frozen structureless atoms or are they built up by the same (or similar) syntactic and morphological structure building mechanisms that are responsible for non-idiomatic expressions? What is the internal organization and makeup of idioms? What is their external syntax, i.e. how does material contained within the idiom interact with material that is not part of the idiom (cf. Makkai 1972; DiSciullo & Williams 1987; Marantz 1984; Fellbaum 1993; Nunberg et al. 1994; Van Gestel 1995; Ifill 2002)?
• Idioms and syntactic diversity: Can we attest micro- and macro-variation in the syntax of idiomatic expressions and if so, where? Do different languages allow different sizes of idioms and/or different syntactic behaviour of idioms?  What implications does this have for the theory of idioms in particular, and what does this tell us about cross-linguistic variation in general (cf. Everaert 1996; Hoeksema 1996, 2010; Hoekstra 2009; Fellbaum 2014; Fellbaum et al. 2003)?
• How should idioms be defined? Where does one draw the line between an idiom and simply a fixed expression such as a well-known metaphor? Does a discontinuous idiom constitute an idiomatic expression in the same way that a continuous idiom does? Should opaque/non-compositional idioms be considered apart from transparent/compositional idioms? Should idioms that exhibit syntactic or lexical flexibility be considered alike with inflexible idioms (cf. Chomsky 1981; Nunberg et al. 1994; O’Grady 1998; Ifill 2002; Svenonius 2005; Grégoire 2009; Hoeksema 2010)?

 
Semantics

• The meaning of idioms: Exactly how is the meaning of an idiomatic construction derived when it follows in no (obvious) way from the meanings of any of the individual lexical items that comprise it? Are idioms stored in our mental lexicon, and if so, how (cf. Chafe 1968; Bach 1974; Fellbaum 1993; Nunberg et al. 1994; Jackendoff 1997; Marantz 1997a,b; Ifill 2002; Svenonius 2005; Grégoire 2009)?

 
Processing

• How are idiomatic expressions processed? What is the role of literal processing during the interpretation of idiomatic expressions? Can idiomatic meaning be accessed directly, or is literal processing crucial in the access of idiomatic meaning? What is the role of structural, lexical, and contextual factors in the retrieval, interpretation of, and processing of idiomatic expressions? How do syntactic compatibility, lexical compatibility, and contextual expectations influence real-time processing of idioms and their non-idiomatic counterparts (cf. Swinney and Cutler 1979; Cacciari and Tabossi 1988; Gibbs & Nayak 1989; Cutting and Bock 1997; Sprenger, Levelt & Kempen 2006; Holsinger 2011, to appear)?

 
Diachrony and Acquisition

• Diachronically speaking, when and how does an expression become an idiom? How does an idiom form?
• How are idioms acquired by L1 learners of a language (cf. Elbers 1989)?

 

Invited speakers

Christiane D. Fellbaum (Princeton)
Louise McNally (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
Manfred Sailer (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main)
 
Abstract guidelines
 
Abstracts should not exceed two pages, including data, references and diagrams. Abstracts should be typed in at least 11-point font, with one-inch margins (letter-size; 8½ inch by 11 inch or A4) and a maximum of 50 lines of text per page. Abstracts must be anonymous and submissions are limited to 2 per author, at least one of which is co-authored. Only electronic submissions will be accepted. Please submit your abstract using the EasyChair link for BCGL8: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=bcgl8
 
 
 Important dates

• First call for papers: January 21, 2015
• Second call for papers: February 15, 2015
• Abstract submission deadline: March 15, 2015
• Notification of acceptance: April 15, 2015
• Conference: June 4-5, 2015

 
Conference location

CRISSP – KU Leuven Brussels Campus
Warmoesberg 26
1000 Brussels
Belgium
 
Organizing institutions

Center for Research in Syntax, Semantics & Phonology (CRISSP) – KU Leuven
Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS (UiL OTS) – Universiteit Utrecht
 
Questions?

 

Contact us by email: bcgl8@crissp.be

Website: http://www.crissp.be/bcgl8/

Kie Zuraw visits department

Kie Zuraw (UCLA) will be visiting the department this week. She will give the department colloquium on Friday, February 27, at 3:30 in N400. A title of her abstract follows.

Polarized Variation

The normal distribution--the bell curve--is common in all kinds of data, and is often expected when the quantity being measured results from multiple independent factors. The distribution of phonologically varying words, however, is sharply non-normal in the cases examined in this talk (from English, French, Hungarian,Tagalog, and Samoan). Instead of most words' showing some medial rate of variation (say, 50% of a word's tokens are regular and 50% irregular), with smaller numbers of words having extreme behavior, words cluster at the extremes of behavior--that is, a histogram of exceptionality rates is shaped like a U (or sometimes J) rather than a bell.  The U shape cannot be accounted for by positing a binary distinction with some amount of noise over tokens, because some items (though the minority) clearly are variable, even speaker-internally. In some cases (e.g., French "aspirated" words) there is a diachronic explanation: sound change caused some words to become exceptional, so that the starting point for today's situation was already U-shaped. But in other cases, such an explanation is not available, and items seem to be attracted towards extreme behavior.

Two mechanisms for deriving U-shaped distributions will be presented, with some speculation as to why some distributions of variation are U-shaped and others bell-shaped.

Sigrid Beck still speaks tomorrow

Sigrid Beck (Tübingen University) will give a talk entitled “Readings of ‘noch’ (‘still’)” in N400 tomorrow, Monday, February 23, at 2:45.

Psycholing Evening

Shayne Sloggett writes:

The psycholing workshop will be having another evening meeting this week to hear from Caroline Andrews about the possibility of experimental work on the anaphor agreement effect in Swahili. As with last time, we'll be meeting at 8:00pm on Tuesday (February 24) in Northampton. 

As a quick reminder to those of you attending CUNY this year, our CUNY prep session is a scant two weeks away! If you're interested in participating and getting some feedback on your talk/poster before the conference, be sure to bring a (reasonably finished) draft to our meeting on March 5. I'll send out another email with more details when we get closer to the date.

SSRG on Wednesday

Leland Kusmer writes:

SSRG will meet next Wednesday, February 25th. We'll meet at 7:30 as usual, this time at the home of Jon Ander and Megan.

This meeting will be our journal overview for Natural Language Semantics. Thanks to everyone who's already signed up to present an issue! If you haven't signed up yet, there are still two issues left:

http://bit.ly/SSRGReadsNLS

As always, if you're planning on coming, please RSVP so I know how much food to buy:

http://doodle.com/2igaukgqpc24f2z5

Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten receives NSF dissertation grant

Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten has received a doctoral dissertation research improvement grant from the National Science Foundation for “Expressing attitudes of belief and desire in Navajo.” Congratulations Elizabeth!

Deniz Ozyildiz in Syntax Workshop on Thursday

Deniz Ozyildiz will give a talk at the syntax workshop this Thursday, February 26, at 10 AM in N452. A title and abstract of his talk follows.

The syntax of the Turkish polar question particle "mI"

"The syntax of the Turkish polar question particle "mI" is currentlynot well understood. I will motivate the argument (i) that mI is asyntactic head positioned above the TP and (ii) that it attracts anassociate XP to its specifier position. This successfully derives thepolar question particle's distribution pattern, crucially therestrictions that bear upon it, in both root and embedded clauses. Itequally makes predictions about the geometry of alternative questions,predictions that appear to be borne out."

Tracy Conner and Nick LaCara in print!

The papers presented at the 2013 Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft meeting in Potsdam have appeared in a volume by de Gruyter Mouton called “Parenthesis and Ellipsis.” Tracy Conner’s “Heads must be heard: Overtness and ellipsis licensing” and Nick LaCara’s “Discourse inversion and deletion in as parenthetical” are inside. Congratulations Tracy and Nick!

Spectrolunch

Deniz Ozyildiz writes:

Our Spectrogram reading lunch last week was a success, and we have decided to meet every week - so that's Wednesdays at 1:35. We will also be meeting in N400 starting next week (LARC having been moved somewhere else).

We have a bunch of recordings and we apparently work very slowly, so there is actually no "need" for more. But of course, if you would like to share something fun, interesting etc. please feel free to do so.

Call for papers: Morphosyntactic Triggers of Tone

Morphosyntactic Triggers of Tone: New Data and Theories
13-14 June 2015
Leipzig

Whereas tone has played a central role in the evolution of phonological theory (Goldsmith 1976, Pulleyblank 1986, Yip 2002), the channels by which morphology and syntax trigger tonal reflexes or conversely restrict tonal alternations are still hardly understood.Firmly persuaded by Hyman's (2011) dictum that `tone can do everythingsegmental or metrical phonology can do' (and more), we think that itis absolutely essential for linguistics to develop a better understanding for the empirical richness and the theoretical implications of the morphosyntax of tone. The goal of this workshop isto provide a forum to this end which brings together descriptively and theoretically oriented linguists addressing questions such as:

• How does morphosyntactic structure interact with tonal phonology? Do syntactic constructions trigger specific tone patterns? Which types of morphosyntactic boundaries restrict (or are required by) general tonal alternations? Does opacity in tonal processes correlate with morphological and syntactic levels of derivation?

• How does tonal featural affixation work morphologically? how are tonal morphemes linearized? Where do they show systematic patterns ofsyncretism and blocking or multiple exponence? What is the distribution of tonal prefixation and suffixation? Is there a tonal equivalent to infixation, and how does tonal overwriting work in contrast to additive tonal morphology?

• What can tonal phenomena teach us about the morphology-syntaxinterface? Are tonal alternations at the phrasal level substantially different from word-level processes? Where do tonal alternations crosscut the boundaries between word-level morphology and phrasal syntax?

We invite abstracts for twenty-minute talks with a ten-minutediscussion. We especially encourage contributions which present original fieldwork (or experimental results), but also highly welcome submissions that provide new theoretical approaches, establish new descriptive generalizations, or, simply, bring to the fore relevant data that have been published, but so far ignored in a the theoretical discussion.

Invited Speakers

• Yuni Kim (University of Manchester)• Mary Paster (Pomona College)

• Gerrit Dimmendaal (University of Cologne)

Abstract Submission

Abstracts must be at most one page long. An optional second page is permitted for data and references. Abstracts must be anonymous.
Submissions are limited to one individual and one joint abstract per author, or two joint abstracts per author.

The abstract should be submitted as a PDF attachment and sent to the following e-mail address:
Eva.Zimmermann[aet]uni-leipzig.de

Please use `Abstract' as the Subject header and include the information in (1) - (4), which should constitute the body of the message. Please make sure that all fonts are embedded.

Author Information

• Name(s) of author(s)

• Title of talk

• Affiliation(s)

• E-mail address(es)

Deadline for Submission:  March 31, 2015
Notification of Acceptance:  April 15, 2015

Call for papers: BUCLD

THE 40th ANNUAL BOSTON UNIVERSITY CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENTNOVEMBER 13-15, 2015

Join us for BUCLD's 40th anniversary!

CALL FOR SYMPOSIUM PROPOSALS

We are soliciting proposals for 90-minute symposia for the Boston University Conference on Language Development on any topic likely to be of broad interest to the conference attendees. The symposium format is open, but has frequently included 2-3 speakers presenting research from differing angles on a common theme.  

Proposals should include a list of the participants, specific topics, and a specification of the format, and should name at least one organizer who will be able to work with the BUCLD organizing committee in setting up the symposium.  Submissions can be sent by email to langconf@bu.edu with "Symposium proposal" indicated in the subject line.  Please limit symposium proposals to 1000 words or fewer.

DEADLINE: April 15, 2015

Decisions on symposia will be made by June.

NOTE: Submissions of abstracts for 20-minute talks and poster presentations are not being solicited at this time. The deadline for those will be 8:00 PM EST, May 15, 2015.

FURTHER INFORMATION

General conference information is available at: http://www.bu.edu/bucld

Questions about symposia should be sent to langconf@bu.edu.

Gillian Gallagher gives department colloq

Gillian Gallagher (NYU) will give the department colloquium this Friday, February 20, in the colloq room (N400) at 3:30. A title and abstract of her talk follows.

Natural classes in phonotactic learning

The core representational unit in phonology is the feature, used to  define contrasts between sound categories (/i/ and /e/ are  distinguished by [±high]) and to pick out classes of sounds that  pattern together in the phonology ([+high] vowels may be restricted  from final position in some languages). Traditionally, phonological  features are thought to bear a direct relation to phonetic properties  (Jakobson, Fant & Halle 1952; Chomsky & Halle 1968). Under more recent  proposals, though, features are labels for phonologically active  classes that may bear a loose or no relation to the phonetics of the  sounds in question (Mielke 2008). In this talk, I present evidence  that phonetics plays a direct role in the natural classes used in the  phonological grammar.

The cooccurrence phonotactics of Quechua provide evidence for natural  classes grouping aspirated stops with the glottal fricative [h], and  grouping ejective stops with the glottal stop [?]. In addition to  being phonologically active, both of these classes are phonetically  definable based on articulatory properties of the glottis: [spread  glottis] picks out aspirates and [h], [constricted glottis] picks out  ejectives and [?]. Despite the phonological and phonetic support, two  nonce word tasks fail to find evidence for these natural classes in  speakers' grammars. Instead, aspirate and ejective stops seem to be  targeted by the phonotactics to the exclusion of their glottal  counterparts. It is proposed that the preference for these smaller  classes of laryngeally marked stops is phonetically based, deriving  from the salience of the acoustic properties unique to stops.

Gillian Gallagher at Sound Workshop

Gillian Gallagher will be present at the Sound Workshop this Friday, February 20. The Workshop will focus on her two papers "An identity bias in phonotactics: Evidence from Cochabamba Quechua,” and "Asymmetries in the representation of categorical phonotactics."

Have a Spectrogram for Lunch

Deniz Ozylidz writes:

A bunch of us are organizing a roughly weekly spectrogram reading lunch. If you're interested, please join us this Wednesday, the 18th at 1:35PM. 

I will try to book the conference room as the projector and the whiteboard are in an ideal configuration. But this is subject to change.

We will go over organizational details, set up a schedule and Leland and/or I will bring recordings to work on. Feel free to come with something yourselves!

Michael Clauss in LARC on Wednesday

Jeremy Hartman writes:

Mike Clauss will present and lead a discussion in LARC this Wednesday, at 12:15 in N400 (note new time for this semester).  Mike will talk to us about:

"A Family of Relatives: Exploring the acquisition of Relatives, Free Relatives, and Clefts."

Please join us!

SSRG reads Natural Language Semantics

Leland Kusmer writes:

Our next meeting will be on Wednesday, February 25th. At that meeting, we'll be doing a journal overview for Natural Language Semantics.

Just to remind you of the format: Each of us will claim one issue of NLS from the past three years. At the meeting, each of us will give very brief (handout-free) summaries of the material therein. The idea is for each summary to be maybe 3 minutes long. The idea is to get a high-level overview of what's been happening in the field rather than to get into any of the details of the individual papers.

I've set up a spreadsheet for you to claim an issue. Please only claim an issue if you're reasonably sure you'll be able to attend. Also, if you're planning on attending, please claim an issue!

http://bit.ly/SSRGReadsNLS

Brian Dillon at Syntax Workshop

Brian Dillon will present his work at the Syntax Workshop, this Thursday, February 19, from 10-11 in N451.

Call for papers: How to Make Things Happen

Vincent Homer and Rajesh Bhatt are organizing a workshop in connection with the Eleventh International Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation. Their workshop is called:

How to make things happen in the grammar: The implementation of obligatoriness

The workshop will be on September 22 2015 in Tbilisi, Georgia. I full description of the workshop can be found here. Submissions for 45 minute talks are being accepted until May 15. Here is the call:

We invite abstract submissions for 45 (35+10) minute oral presentations devoted to the implementation of obligatoriness in grammar. See call information for details concerning the workshop theme. Abstracts should contain original research that, at the time of submission, has neither been published nor accepted for publication. One person can submit at most one abstract as sole author and one abstract as co-author. Abstracts must be submitted electronically in PDF format. Submissions should be anonymous and not reveal the identity of the author(s) in any form (e.g., references, file name or properties of the abstract). Abstracts must not exceed two pages in letter-size or A4 paper, including examples and references, with 2.5 cm (or 1 inch) margins on all sides and 12 point font size. Abstracts should be submitted by email to the following address: obligatoriness2015gmail.com. 

Important Dates: 

Submission deadline: May 15, 2015, 11:59 PM, CET 

Notification of acceptance: Late June 

Registration deadline: September 1, 2015 

Workshop: September 22, 2015

Sigrid Beck speaks on February 23

Sigrid Beck (Tübingen University) will give a talk at 2:45 on Monday, February 23. Her talk is entitled “Readings of ‘noch’ (‘still’).” The room of her talk will be posted in next week’s WHISC.

New Directions in Negation and Polarity

UMass was well-represented at a workshop on negation and polarity held at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem February 8-10. UMass alumna Aynat Rubinstein presented a paper with Edit Doron on “Expletive negation in constituent unconditionals.” Masaaki Kamiya presented a paper jointly authored by Tom Roeper entitled “Neg-feature separation in DP/Nominalization.” And Vincent Homer also presented a talk, entitled "Remarks on Languages with No Negation."

Call for papers: Workshop on Quantification

Katalin Kiss, Lilla Pintér and Tamás Zétényi write:

We are pleased to announce a workshop on Linguistic and Cognitive Aspects of Quantification, to be held at the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest on October 16–17, 2015.
 
Website: http://www.nytud.hu/lcq2015/ 

Invited Speakers:
 
Yosef Grodzinsky (University of Jerusalem): Quantifier Polarity, Numerosity, and Verification Procedures: Experimental Explorations

Irina Sekerina (City University New York): What Eye Movements Reveal About Quantifier-Spreading
 
We expects abstracts for 30-minute talks (+ 10 minute discussions) and poster presentations. Abstracts should be anonymous and no longer than two pages, including references and examples, in 12-point Times New Roman, with margins of at least 2,5 cm / 1 inch.Abstracts are to be submitted in pdf-format via the EasyChair system.

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=lcq2015

If you have any questions about the workshop, please feel free to contact us at the following e-mail address: quantification.workshop@gmail.com

Candy

WHISC has intercepted this message from the department’s Candy Monster.

In the months since September, when I assumed the responsibilities of Candy Monster, this department has consumed $192.88 in candy. In that same time, the ceramic piggy has consumed only $179.84 in change. My predecessor was able to leave us with some small reserve, but as of this morning the department candy fund is now officially empty.

This most recent resupply has left us with enough candy to last us perhaps three weeks. Please help me to replenish our fund before then.

Call for papers: Northwest Linguistics Conference

For nearly thirty years the Northwest Linguistics Conference (NWLC) has been held, on an alternating basis, by linguistics graduate students at four major universities in British Columbia and Washington State: the University of Washington, the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, and the University of Victoria.
 
The upcoming 31st NWLC will take place at the University of Victoria on the 25th and 26th of April, 2015, with the aim of fostering the ongoing exchange of ideas between students involved in all areas of linguistics. Abstracts are now being accepted for both oral and poster presentations. Oral presentations will be 20 minutes plus 10 minutes for questions, and the poster presentation will be 1 hour. Presenters of both types will have the opportunity to submit a short (maximum 10-page) proceedings paper of their research (submissions to be received before June 1st, 2015) which will be published in Vol. 25 of the Working Papers of the Linguistics Circle of the University of Victoria: http://web.uvic.ca/~wplc/
 
Abstracts should be submitted online at http://linguistlist.org/easyabs/NWLC2015 by Feb. 2, 2015 (now extended to Feb.16th, 2015)*. Abstracts should be maximum 300 words in length excluding illustrations and references, and include at least 3 keywords. Your name or affiliation should not appear in the body of your abstract; instead, please include these in the body of your email along with your paper title, and whether you have a preference for either an oral or poster presentation, or both.

Kai von Fintel in the news

There is a lengthy profile of UMass alumnus Kai von Fintel on the website for MIT's School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, for which Kai is Associate Dean. You can find the article here.

Bhatt on the road

WHISC has learned that Rajesh Bhatt was busy presenting papers over the Winter break. He presented joint work with Veneeta Dayal in a paper presented at Leipzig University on December 17 and at Michigan State University on January 15. Those talks were entitled “Polar Questions and Disjunction: clues from Hindi-Urdu ‘kyaa’.

While at Leipzig he also gave on talk on Tree Adjoining Grammars at Kompaktkurs at IGRA.

Hard Core Linguists

Psycholing Workshop on Tuesday

Shayne Sloggett writes:

The psycholing workshop will be having its first evening meeting at 8:00 this Tuesday (2/10) at Amanda's and my apartment. For our first meeting we'll be having an informal discussion of Frazier 1995, which is an assessment of constraint satisfaction models of language processing.

SSRG meets this Wednesday

Leland Kusmer writes:

Based on the results of the poll, SSRG will be held on alternate Wednesday evenings, starting next Wednesday, February 11th, at 7:30pm. I'll be hosting this one. We’ll discuss plans for the rest of the semester.

As always, please RSVP so I know how much food to buy

http://doodle.com/ahh4ynw2cmikir8q

Syntax Workshop this Thursday

The syntax workshop meets at 10AM on Thursday, Feb. 12, in N451. Kyle Johnson will talk about Andrews Amalgams.

Claire Moore-Cantwell at Ben Gurion

Claire Moore-Cantwell is giving a talk at Ben Gurion University of the Negev during her visit there Tuesday and Wednesday. The title of her talk is: "Probabilistic phonotactics: What’s in the grammar and how can we tell?"

Barbara Pearson at AAAS

Barbara Pearson writes:

I am in San Jose at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting with her Linguistics for Everyone Committee. With representatives from UMass, UMD, OSU and U Arizona, plus some volunteers from Stanford, I organized an LSA booth at Family Science Days, a weekend of science activities for people from preschool to the senior center. I think this is the first time language science has been represented there. Activities coordinators are Cecile McKee, Elly Zimmer, and Kathryn Campbell-Kibler. I promise to return with a whole suite of cool linguistics outreach activities!

If you, or someone you know, will be at the AAAS this year, be sure you (or they) come by Booth 36.

Final Call: Sinn und Bedeutung

Sinn und Bedeutung 20 with Workshop: "Experimental Methodology in Semantics and Pragmatics"

9-12 September 2015 -- University of Tuebingen

Tuebingen, Germany

Conference website

***Call Deadline: 15 February 2015***

The University of Tübingen is proud to host the 20th Sinn und Bedeutung.

Invited Speakers:

Luisa Marti (UQML)

Uli Sauerland (ZAS)

Junko Shimoyama (McGill)

-- Special Session --
Semantic Theory Evolves Continuously – Here’s Our Workshop! (STECHOW)

In addition to the oral presentations and poster sessions, there will be a special workshop celebrating 20 years of Sinn und Bedeutung, and to honour Arnim von Stechow and his contribution to the field of semantics:

Special Session Organisers:

Doris Penka (University of Konstanz)

Sarah Zobel (University of Tübingen)

Special Session Speakers:

Sigrid Beck (University of Tübingen)

Irene Heim (MIT)

Barbara Partee (UMass, Amherst)

Viola Schmitt (University of Vienna)

For more information about STECHOW, go here.

There is also a special Workshop: Experimental Methodology in Semantics and Pragmatics, which is accepting abstracts for 20 minute talks. For more information about this workshop, go here.

For questions or enquiries please write to:

sub20.tuebingen at gmail.com

Call for Papers: Conference on Formal Grammar

The 20th Conference on Formal Grammar

Barcelona, Spain,

August 8-9, 2015                 

http://fg.phil.hhu.de/2015/
 

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

         ** SUBMISSION DEADLINE: February 22, 2015 **

BACKGROUND

FG-2015 is the 20th conference on Formal Grammar, to be held in conjunction with the European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information, which takes place in 2015 in Barcelona, Spain.
Previous Formal Grammar meetings were held in Barcelona (1995), Prague (1996), Aix-en-Provence (1997), Saarbrücken (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), Düsseldorf (2013) and Tübingen (2014).

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 22, 2015**.

Papers must be submitted electronically at EasyChair:

https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=fg2015

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-2016, depending on the number of accepted papers.

IMPORTANT DATES

* February 22, 2015: Deadline for paper submission

*April 19, 2015: Notification of acceptance

* May 31, 2015: Camera ready copies due

* August 8-9, 2015: Conference dates

Chuck Kisseberth talks on Wednesday

Lisa Selkirk writes:

Pioneering phonologist and pioneer in the study of the syntactic conditioning of tonal and segmental phenomena in the sentence in Bantu  languages, Chuck Kisseberth will give a talk on Prosody, Phonological  Phrasing, and Focus in Chimiini next Wednesday in Kristine Yu's  Phonological Theory class in Room N-458 in the ILC.  

For more  information about Kisseberth, please consult  http://www.linguistics.illinois.edu/people/ckissebe.

In order to provide a normal length time slot for a talk of this sort,  it will get an early start at 12:15 (instead of 12:20). The main  presentation will last roughly an hour, until 1:15, and there will be  a half an hour for discussion, ending at roughly 1:45.  Given the  constraints of normal class schedules and the unusual time slot, it's  understandable that people may have to leave during the discussion  session after the talk. Feel free to bring your lunch to the talk.

Julie Legate gives department colloq

Julie Legate (University of Pennsylvania) will give the department colloquium Friday, February 6, at 3:30 in ILC N400. The title of her talk is “Restrictive Phi in a Partial Typology of Noncanonical Passives,” and an abstract follows.

In this talk, I investigate the syntactic structure of noncanonical passives, focusing on the role played by phi-features that restrict rather than saturate the external argument position. Building on previous work by myself and others, I show that voice is encoded in a functional projection, VoiceP, which is distinct from, and higher than, vP. I demonstrate that microvariations in the properties of VoiceP and in the location of restrictive phi-features explain a wide range of noncanonical passives, including agent-agreeing passives, restricted agent passives, accusative object passives, impersonals, and object voice. The analysis draws on data from a typologically diverse set of languages.

Kristine Yu at MIT on Friday

Kristine Yu will give the department colloq at MIT on Friday, February 6 at 3:30 in room 32-141. The title of her talk is “Tonal marking of absolutive case in Samoan,” and an abstract follows.

This paper argues that the ergative-marking Austronesian languageSamoan has a high boundary tone that occurs on the last mora of theword preceding an absolutive argument, and that the source of thistone is inflectional morphology and not lexical representations,pragmatics, syntax, semantics, or phonology. In short, the claim isthat Samoan has an absolutive high boundary tone case morpheme. Thisclaim is surprising for two reasons. First, Samoan is not a tonelanguage. Second, regardless of the source of the absolutive tone,positing it: (1) introduces a boundary paradox since it groups anabsolutive case head with the prosodic constituent preceding theabsolutive argument, and (2) implies that the presence of anabsolutive induces a new phonological constituent.  Nevertheless, Ishow that inflectional morphology must be the source of the absolutivehigh tone based on a converging body of evidence from: (1) thedistribution of the rarely discussed ia particle that optionallyprecedes absolutive arguments and (2) the phonetic and phonologicalanalysis of intonational patterns in the spoken utterances of asystematically varied set of syntactic structures. I also address thepuzzles that the presence of an absolutive tonal case morpheme inSamoan raises.

Postdoc at Leiden University

Aniko Liptak from Leiden University writes:

For the NWO project ‘Ellipsis licensing beyond syntax’, which will start later this year in Leiden, Lisa (Cheng) and me are looking for a PhD student and a postdoc in the field of syntax & prosody – see the two job advertisements on the Leiden University website, here and here .

Call for papers: ACED-17

The English Department of the University of Bucharest will hold its 17th Annual Conference from 4–6 June, 2015. This year our invited speakers are: 

ALESSANDRA GIORGI – University of Venice

GIULIANA GIUSTI – University of Venice 

Papers are invited in:

General Linguistics

Linguistic Theories

Theoretical Linguistics (syntax, phonology, semantics and the interfaces)

Language acquisition

Applied Linguistics 

Presentations should be in English, and will be allocated 25 minutes each, plus 5 minutes for discussion. Prospective participants are invited to submit anonymous abstracts in both Word and Pdf formats. Proposals should be one A4 page (plus an additional page for examples and references), Times New Roman 12, single spaced. Please include name, affiliation and title in the body of your message. 

Conference fee: 50 euro (or equivalent in Romanian Lei)

(covering lunches and refreshments during the conference, but not evening meals)

Deadline for proposals: 15 March 2015

Notification of acceptance: 15 April 2015

Please send proposals (and enquiries) to the following e-mail address: 17.ACED@gmail.com

Annual Review of Linguistics now available

A new online journal, Annual Review of Linguistics, is now available. An introduction to the journal by co-editors Mark Liberman and Barbara Partee can be found here. The table of contents for the first volume is here. A brief description of the goals of the journal follows. Online access is free through January 2016!

The goal of the Annual Review of Linguistics is to offer access to significant developments across our increasingly diverse field, including all scientific approaches to the study of speech, language, and communication, as well as significant applications of linguistics in technology, medicine, law, education, and public policy. Articles are written for an audience that is centered on the core disciplines of academic linguistics, but extends to researchers, teachers, and students in all fields that are concerned with the forms and functions of human language. If we succeed in our mission, articles should be of benefit to both specialists and nonspecialists, to experts as well as to students, to teachers of introductory courses, and to scholars in neighboring fields.

 

Lyn Frazier in Tübingen

Lyn Frazier gave an invited talk, “An act apart: processing not at issue content,” last Thursday (January 22) at a workshop at Tübingen University called “The Division of Labor: A View from Syntax, Semantics, Information Structure and Processing." You can learn more about her talk here, and more about the workshop here.

PRG on Wednesday

Ivy Hauser and Coral Hughto write:

The first meeting of PRG will be next Wednesday, 1/28 at 7pm.  Sang-Im has volunteered to host us at her place in Northampton.  If you would like to discuss or present something let us know, otherwise we will work on planning the rest of the semester and have a popcorn paper discussion (no preparation necessary).  
Also please RSVP so we know how much food to get.

Roeper, Sevcenco and Pearson at LARC on Friday

Jeremy Hartman writes:

Please join us for the first LARC meeting of the semester on Fri, Jan 30 at 11:30AM in N400.  Everyone is invited!  We'll hear from Tom, presenting work with Barbara and Anca:

Tom Roeper (with Anca Sevcenco and Barbara Pearson):Update on Recursion: New insights, ideas, and approaches from the Holyoke Museum  

Friday, Jan 30 @ 11:30AM, Room N400 ILC

Call for paper: Workshop on the Morphological, Syntactic and Semantic Aspects of Dispositions

University of Stuttgart, Germany

25 June – 27 June 2015

https://sites.google.com/site/dispositions2015/

The goal of this workshop is to explore questions about the
morpho-syntax, semantics and underlying ontology of words and
constructions used to describe dispositions. The central aim of the
workshop is to develop a better understanding of how existing and novel
insights from different approaches to dispositions can be integrated
into a single theory of dispositions and their linguistic descriptions.

Invited Speakers:
Artemis Alexiadou (Stuttgart)
Elena Castroviejo (Madrid)
Ariel Cohen (Ben Gurion)
Bridget Copley (Paris)
Nora Boneh (Jerusalem)
Hans Kamp (Stuttgart)
Marika Lekakou (Ioannina)
John Maier (Cambridge, TBC)
Christopher Piñón (Lille)
Stephan Schmid (Berlin)
Barbara Vetter (Berlin)

Questions to be addressed by the Workshop:
1. What are the truth conditions of dispositional statements?
2. How are these truth conditions determined compositionally?
3. In what ways can dispositions be linguistically expressed?
4. What are linguistic tests for dispositionality?
5. Are there distinct notions of ‘disposition’ between which a
linguistic theory of disposition description should distinguish?
6. Among the words that can be used to express dispositionality are
nouns, adjectives and verbs. What systematic connections are there
between the ways in which different parts of speech do this, in
particular between deverbal nouns and adjectives and the underlying verbs?
7. What role do temporal and aspectual sentence constituents play in the
verbal expression of dispositions?
8. How do dispositional statements differ from habitual and frequency
statements?
9. What relations are there between dispositions and causality?
10. One of the constructions that can be used to describe dispositions
are middles. (An example: the German sentence `Dieser Satz liest sich
leicht’ (‘This sentence is easy to read’)). Is ‘middle’ a
morpho-syntactic or a notional concept? Where do the argument positions
of disposition-expressing middles come from? What is the
syntax-semantics interface for these constructions?

For a more detailed outline of the Workshop, please consult the Workshop
homepage:

https://sites.google.com/site/dispositions2015/general-information


Call for Papers:
We welcome submissions for a 20 minute talk (followed by 10 minutes of
discussion) or a poster on any topic relevant to the goals of the
workshop. We particularly welcome contributions addressing the
linguistic relevance of philosophical insights on dispositions or the
philosophical relevance of linguistic insights on dispositions.
All submitted abstracts should be written in English and be limited to
two single-spaced pages, complete with examples and bibliography. All
texts should fit within two A4 pages, with 2,54 cm/1-inch margins all
around. Each abstract should start with the title (centered) at top,
above the main text. Use font size 12 throughout (except for examples),
preferably in Times or Times New Roman. The abstract should be
camera-ready. Authors may submit at most one individual and one
co-authored abstract.
Save your abstract as a PDF. Name your abstract with your last name
followed by the suffix pdf (e.g., huang.pdf). Submit your abstract via
the EasyChair Conference, online submission system:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=dinl2015

Please leave your name and affiliation out of the abstract. Please
indicate whether your abstract is for a talk, a poster or both.

Deadline for submissions: March 1st, 2015
Notification of acceptance: March 31st, 2015

Contact: dispositions.workshop@gmail.com

Stefan Keine's paper appears

Stefan Keine’s paper “Differential argument encoding by impoverishment,” co-authored with Gereon Müller has now appeared in the volume “Scales and Hierarchies,” edited by Ina Bornkessel-Schleswsky, Andrej Malchukov and Marc Richards.

Congratulations Stefan!

WCCFL Schedule

WCCFL 33 will be at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver March 27-29, and its program has just been released. UMass is well represented:

Stefan Keine presents the paper “Locality Domains in Syntax: Evidence from Processing"

Robert Staubs presents the paper “Computational modeling of non-finality effects on stress typology"

Anisa Schardl presents the poster “Two Kinds of Partial Movement: Evidence from Dholuo and German Wh-Questions."

Jon Ander Mendia presents the poster “Typicality Effects and Distributivity"

Alex Drummond (with Dave Kush) presents the poster “Decomposing the Spanish Causative Reflexive Passive"

In addition, there are many UMass alumnae talks or posters, including:

Elliot Moreton, Jennifer Smith, Amy Rose Deal, Andrew Mckenzie, Ana Arregui, Karen Jesney, and Rose-Marie Déchaine.