UMass at LSA

The annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America meets in Washington D.C. from January 7 to January 10. UMass is well represented:

Alumna Gillian Gallagher is a coauthor of the paper “Rapid phonotactic generalization: Behavioral evidence and a Bayesian model"

Meghan Armstrong, with Scott Schwenster, presents the paper “Epistemic stress shift in American English."

Barbara Pearson and Tom Roeper present the paper “Linguistic and pragmatic ambiguity of quantified expressions in mathematics word problems"

Robert Staubs, Coral Hughto and Joe Pater, with Jennifer Culbertson, present the paper “Grammar and learning in syntactic and phonological typology"

Alumnus Jonah Katz, with Sarah Lee, present the paper “Cue integration and fricative perception in Seoul Korean"

Alumna Cherlon Ussery, with Lydia Ding and Rebecca Liu, present the paper “The Typology of Mandarin Infinitives"

Nick LaCara presents the paper “Verb Phrase movement as a window into head movement."

Alumnus Jeffrey Runner, with Yuhang Xu, presents the paper “Locality effects in long-distance reflexive retrieval: the case of Mandarin Chinese “ziji"

Stefan Keine presents the paper “Positions versus items in the syntax of super-raising"

Claire Moore-Cantwell, Joe Pater, Lisa Sanders, Robert Staubs and Benjamin Zobel present the poster “Phonological Learning in the laboratory: ERP evidence"

Aleksei Nazarov presents the poster "Ambiguity of analysis: Learning Dutch stress with input inference"

Robert Staubs presents the poster “Learning morpheme segmentation with distributions over underlying representations"

Alumnus Florian Schwarz, with Hezekiah Akiva Bacovcin, presents the poster “Local Accommodation and Presupposition Trigger Class: Results from the Covered Box Task” and, with Ava Irani, the paper “Two Types of Definites in American Sign Language."

Ivy Hauser presents the paper “VOT variation and perceptual distinction"

Tom Ernst, with Timothy Grinsell, presents the paper “The Semantics of Domain Adverbs"

Alumna Maria Gouskova, with Suzy Ahn, presents the paper “Sublexical phonotactics of English -er suffixes"

Alumna Jennifer Smith presents the paper “Segmental noun/verb phonotactic differences are productive too"

UMass at ConSOLE

The 24th annual meeting of the Conference of the Student Organization of Linguistics in Europe (ConSOLE) will be hosted by the University of York and York St John University from January 6 to January 8. UMass is represented by three of our graduate students:

Jon Ander Mendia will present the paper “Complex Cardinals of approximation in Spanish"

Thuy Bui will present the paper “Menominee agreement: two probes for two hierarchies"

Rodica Ivan will present the poster “Wonder if embedded, know whether semi-question"

Lisa, Alice and Barbara at the LSA

At the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America this coming weekend, our own Alice Harris will officially begin her term as the 92nd President of the LSA. In addition, Lisa Green will be inducted as a Fellow of the LSA and Barbara Partee will receive the Victoria A. Fromkin Lifetime Service Award.

WHISC salutes Professors Harris, Green and Partee!

Call for papers: SULA 9

We invite submissions of abstracts for papers (25-minute presentation plus 10-minute discussion) or posters on any topic in the semantics of under-represented languages of the Americas. As in previous years, sessions will include a discussion period at the end with commentators.

The abstract submission deadline is January 15, 2016 at 11:59 pm PST.

Abstracts must be at most two pages long, including data and references, on letter-size or A4 paper with 1 inch margins on all sides and at least 11 point font. Abstracts should have a clear title and should be anonymous. The abstract must be submitted electronically in PDF format.

We are using EasyChair for the submission and review process. Abstracts must be submitted through the following website: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sula9

When you submit your abstract, please indicate whether your abstract should be considered for a talk, a poster, or both. Submissions are limited to 1 individual and 1 joint abstract per author, or 2 joint abstracts per author.

Important Dates:
Submission deadline: January 15, 2016 (11:59 pm PST)
Notification of acceptance: Late February
Conference date: May 6-8, 2016

For more information, go here.

Call for papers: NEST

John Kingston writes:

NEST 2016 (= New England Sequence and Timing) will be held in N400 on Saturday, 5 March. Rebecca Spencer, of Psychological and Brain Sciences, and I have been hosting the meeting since Bruno Repp, of Haskins Labs, retired 3 years ago. If you have work that addresses how people control the sequence or timing of events in speaking or how they perceive sequences and timing in speech, you should consider submitting a title and abstract to me. Getting a speaking slot is on a first-come-first-served basis, so don't dilly-dally. If you're interested in these phenomena, you should consider attending.

Call for papers: Sub-Saharan African Languages

Special Session at Interspeech 2016:
Sub-Saharan African languages : from speech fundamentals to applications

Call for papers

This special session aims at gathering researchers in speech technology and researchers in linguistics (working in language documentation and fundamentals of speech science). Such a partnership is particularly important for Sub-Saharan African languages which tend to remain under-resourced, under-documented and often also unwritten. Prospective authors are invited to submit original papers in the following areas:

ASR and TTS for Sub-Saharan African languages and dialects

Cross-lingual and multi-lingual acoustic and lexical modeling

Applications of spoken language technologies for the African continent

Phonetic and linguistic studies in Sub-Saharan African languages

Zero resource speech technologies: unsupervised discovery of linguistic units

Language documentation for endangered languages of Africa

Machine-assisted annotation of speech and laboratory phonology

Resource / Corpora production in African languages

Submission deadline

Same as regular Interspeech 2016 papers: March 23, 2016

Special session web site

For more details on this special session: http://alffa.imag.fr/interspeech-2016-special-session-proposal/

Interspeech 2016 conference website: http://www.interspeech2016.org/

Organizers

Martine Adda-Decker (madda@limsi.fr) – CNRS – LPP and LIMSI, France.

Laurent Besacier (laurent.besacier@imag.fr) - Univ. Grenoble-Alpes, France - LIG laboratory.

Marelie Davel (marelie.davel@nwu.ac.za) – North-West University, Vanderbijlpark, South Africa.

Larry Hyman (hyman@berkeley.edu) - Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley.

Martin Jansche (mjansche@google.com) – Google, London, UK.

Francois Pellegrino (francois.pellegrino@univ-lyon2.fr) – CNRS – DDL Lyon, France.

Olivier Rosec (olivier.rosec@voxygen.fr) – Voxygen SAS,- Pleumeur-Bodou, France.

Sebastian Stüker (sebastian.stueker@kit.edu) - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany.

Martha Tachbelie Yifiru (martha.yifiru@aau.edu.et) – School of Information Science, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia.

Call for papers: Language Contact, Continuity and Change in the Emergence of Modern Hebrew

Angelika Kratzer writes:

This is a call for papers for a fascinating conference by the “Emergence of Modern Hebrew Research Group” at the Mandel Scholion Interdisciplinary Research Center at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Our alum Aynat Rubinstein is a current fellow at the Mandel Scholion Research Center and is also a member of the research group. This conference has a very interesting conception: you do not have to work on Modern Hebrew to participate. They are interested in a much wider range of topics:

1. Description and characterization of the revival of Hebrew, preferably with emphasis on the less studied aspects (morphology and syntax), and how the early language of the non-native speakers differed from that of the first native speakers.

2. Different forms of language contact and planned language change – e.g. revival, standardization, language maintenance – in the history of Hebrew and other languages: Arabic diglossia, revival of Syriac in the Galilee, Yiddish in Haredi communities, Welsh and Manx in Britain, revival of tribal languages in America, Australia, Scandinavia, revival of local Italian dialects, etc.

3. Theoretical models of language variation and change, and the role of language contact.

4. Theoretical work on the nature of heritage languages and creoles. Though Modern Hebrew differs from both, it is based on language skills that do not reflect ordinary linguistic knowledge.

5. The role of children: to what extent does the theory of language acquisition, and in particular bilingual language acquisition, inform the process of language revival? Are the same mechanisms operational in both situations?

Call for papers: ESSLLI

*ESSLLI 2016 STUDENT SESSION*

Held during the 28th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information
Bolzano, Italy, August 15-26, 2016

*Deadline for submissions: March 10th,2016

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=essllistus2016

*ABOUT:*

The Student Session of the 28th European Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (ESSLLI) will take place in Bolzano, Italy,August 15th to 26th (http://esslli2016.unibz.it). We invite submissions of original, unpublished work from students in any area at the intersection of Logic & Language, Language & Computation, or Logic &Computation. Submissions will be reviewed by several experts in the field, and accepted papers will be presented orally or as posters and selected papers will appear in the Student Session proceedings by Springer. This is an excellent opportunity to receive valuable feedback from expert readers and to present your work to a diverse audience.

*ORAL/POSTER PRESENTATIONS:*

Note that there are two separate kinds of submissions, one for oral presentations and one for posters. This means that papers are directly submitted either as oral presentations or as poster presentations. Reviewing and ranking will be done separately. We particularly encourage submissions for posters, as they offer an excellent opportunity to present smaller research projects and research in progress.

*SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:*

Authors must be students, and submissions may be singly or jointly authored. Each author may submit at most one single and one jointly authored contribution. Submissions should not be longer than 8 pages foran oral presentation or 4 pages for a poster presentation (including examples and references). Submissions must be anonymous, without any identifying information. More detailed guidelines regarding submission can be found on the Student Session website: http://www2.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/esslli-stus-2016/.

*SPONSORSHIP AND PRIZES*

As in previous years, Springer has kindly agreed to sponsor the ESSLLI student session. The best poster and best talk will be awarded Springerbook vouchers of 500€ each.

*FURTHER INFORMATION:*

Please direct inquiries about submission procedures or other matters relating to the Student Session to marisa.koellner@uni-tuebingen.de andrziai@sfs.uni-tuebingen.de.

ESSLLI 2016 will feature a wide range of foundational and advanced courses and workshops in all areas of Logic, Language, and Computation. For further information, including registration information and course listings, and for general inquiries about ESSLLI 2016, please consult the main ESSLLI 2016 page: http://esslli2016.unibz.it.

Graduate Program in Paris

The Cognitive Science Departement of Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris (Département d'études cognitives, DEC) aims to recruit advanced undergraduate international students in Cognitive Science and in Linguistics.

DEC and Ecole Normale Supérieure (http://www.ens.fr) offer several international fellowships, intended for advanced undergraduate students who will either directly enroll in a master's program (two-year or three-year fellowship) or first complete their last year of undergraduate studies and then enroll in a master's program (three-year fellowship). These fellowships will be attributed on the basis of a national competitive exam, known as the 'ENS international selection'. For more details (including about eligibility), please visit: http://www.ens.fr/admission/selection-internationale/?lang=en

The fellowships include:

- monthly stipend: 1000 euros;

- possibility of subsidized housing;

- access to subsidized cafeteria (about 4 euros/meal);

- minimal tuition fees (about 500 euros/year).

How to Apply

More detailed information is available on line:

-http://www.cognition.ens.fr/EnseignementFinancementENG

-http://www.ens.fr/admission/selection-internationale/article/session-2016?lang=en

Applications Deadline: 1-Feb-2016

Web Address for Applications: http://www1.ens.fr/recrutement-si/

Contact Information:

Benjamin Spector: benjamin.spector@ens.fr

Call for papers: Definiteness Across Languages

The Faculty of Philosophy and Literature of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the Center for Linguistic and Literary Studies of El Colegio de México will host a workshop on definiteness across languages,  which will take place in June 22-24, in Mexico City. The aim of this event is to bring together linguists working on the syntactic and semantic description of languages as well as on the development of theories in order to discuss answers to two main questions: 

i. What formal strategies do natural languages use to express definiteness?

ii. What are the possible meanings of their definite noun phrases?

Invited speakers

Bert Le Bruyn (Utrecht University) 
(UMass alumnus) Florian Schwarz  (University of Pennsylvania)

Abstract submission 

We invite submissions contributing to the study of any aspect of the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of definite noun phrases in natural languages. Please submit an abstract in PDF format of no more than one page of text with an additional page for extra data, figures, and references. This file must not contain any personal information or affiliation, and must be submitted via EasyChair. If you are not familiar with EasyChair, please follow these submission instructions. 

The talks, which can be given either in English or in Spanish,  should be 30 minutes long followed by 10 minutes of discussion.

Important dates

Deadline for abstract submission: February 14, 2016 

Notification of acceptance: February 28, 2016 

Conference dates: June 22-24, 2016

For more information, go here.

Hartman at MIT

Jeremy Hartman will give two talks at MIT this week — one on Tuesday and the other on Wednesday. The titles and abstracts of his talks follow.

Tuesday, December 15:

What is this construction, that we should be puzzled by it?

I will discuss the construction exemplified below, where a wh- question is followed by a gapless subordinate clause:
 
      a.  What were you doing, that you couldn’t come help me?
            b.  Where is he from, that he talks like that?
            c.  Who are you, to make that demand?
            d.  What did she do, that everyone is so mad at her?

 
A puzzling fact about such sentences is that their declarative counterparts appear to be ungrammatical (*He is from Texas, that he talks like that, *I was on the phone, that I couldn't come help you).  Sentences like these have not, to my knowledge, received a detailed analysis in the syntactic literature. I will offer some preliminary observations about their syntactic properties, their meaning, and their relationship to other syntactic phenomena, including degree constructions.

Wednesday, December 16. ESSL/LacqLab 32-D461 at 5:00PM:

Building a corpus for root infinitives

I will present work in progress, on the development of a large database of children's optional infinitive utterances taken from the English CHILDES corpora, and coded for a variety of factors of interest.  I'll discuss how the database can be used to asses the effects of several syntactic and phonological factors that have been claimed to influence children's use of the root infinitive, as well as the interactions between these factors.

Call for papers: GALANA 7

The 7th biennial conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition - North America (GALANA 7) will take place at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on September 8-10, 2016.

The GALANA conference features theoretically informed research on all types of language acquisition scenarios, including (but not limited to) monolingual first language acquisition, bilingual/multilingual first language acquisition, second language acquisition by children as well as adults, third language acquisition, acquisition of signed as well as spoken languages, language disorders, language acquisition in the presence of cognitive impairment and autism, and the development of pidgins and creoles. GALANA-7 will include a special session on ''Input Variation and Language Acquisition.''

The invited speakers for the main session are Cynthia Fisher (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Roumyana Slabakova (University of Southampton), and Virginia Valian (Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center).

The invited speakers for the special session on Input Variation and Language Acquisition are Karen Miller (Pennsylvania State University) and Janna Oetting (Louisiana State University).

Conference URL: https://publish.illinois.edu/galana2016/

Conference email: galana7.2016@gmail.com

Abstract Submission Deadline: 10-Feb-2016

GALANA-7 invites abstracts of no more than 500 words (with an optional second page for examples, figures and references) for double-blind peer review.

Guidelines and instructions about abstract submission can be found at https://publish.illinois.edu/galana2016/abstract-guidelines-and-submission/

For the general session, abstracts are invited for original, unpublished generative research in all acquisition subfields: L1 acquisition, L2 acquisition, L3 acquisition, bilingualism, multilingualism, creoles and pidgins, and language disorders.

Abstracts are also invited for a special session on Input Variation and Language Acquisition. Understanding how children use input to help form a grammar is central to an adequate theory of language acquisition. Broad differences in input based on dialect variation have been used as a fixed effect in explaining differences in children's grammars. Between-child differences within homogeneous samples of families, similar in socio-economic statuses, speaking the same dialect have also provided insight. The special session Input Variation and Language Acquisition asks how these two approaches relate to one another; specifically how language variety as a fixed effect relates to the random effects of between-child variation within a language variety. The papers presented in this special session will advance theories of grammatical acquisition and applications in the field of child language disorders.

Dillon in D.C.

Brian Dillon gave a colloquium talk at the University of Maryland on Friday, December 11. The title of his talk was "Grammatical illusions in real-time sentence processing: New findings and perspectives." An abstract follows.

One question of enduring interest for psycholinguists is the question of how closely real-time sentence processing routines align with grammatical knowledge: does the competence grammar directly constrain sentence comprehension, or does it play a secondary role, 'cleaning up' the results of a comprehension process driven by heuristics (Lewis & Phillips, 2015; Patson & Ferreira, 2007; Townsend & Bever, 2001)? Much experimental work has provided evidence for the view that the human sentence processor is directly constrained by grammatical knowledge. A challenge for this view is the observation that there are a number of apparently simple grammatical constraints that comprehenders fail to respect in comprehension, such as subject-verb agreement (e.g. Wagers, Lau & Phillips, 2009). Providing an explanation of why we see these 'grammaticality illusions,' and why only certain dependencies seem to be be susceptible to illusory grammaticality, has been a productive research project that has led to new and diverse models of linguistic dependency formation in real-time comprehension (Phillips, Wagers & Lau, 2011). In this talk, I will review this work, and present two case studies from the research group at UMass that provide some new perspectives, and new puzzles, for this project. In the first part of the talk, I will present evidence from English reflexive processing (joint work with Shayne Sloggett) that suggests that grammaticality illusion associated with English reflexives are created by assigning a logophoric interpretation to the reflexive form. In the second part, I present work with Jérémy Pasquereau on a novel grammatical illusion, French quantifier/de-phrase dependencies. This work suggests that not all intrusive licensors are created equal, and that only some quantifiers have the potential to create grammaticality illusion effects in French. Taken together, these studies suggest that grammatical illusions are conditioned by the availability of alternative structures and interpretations made available by the grammar. In a slogan, it appears that what could've been said, but wasn't, seems to play a role in creating grammaticality illusion effects in comprehension.

Hannah Green goes to Washington State University

Barbara Partee writes:

Hannah Greene was in our Ph.D. program from 2011 to 2014, with her main interests in semantics and fieldwork. She had always also loved animals, and while she was our student she did a lot of horse dressage (while helping to care for horses at that stable). In the spring of 2014 she was hard at work on a research paper when she “felt a pull to be elsewhere: a large animal parasitology workshop hosted by my vet.” And from there she realized that what she really wanted to be was a large animal vet - that that was a career that would combine intellectual stimulation with her love of animals. So during the 2014-2015 academic year she embarked on an intensive program in "pre-vet" courses here at UMass, which she just completed, and this fall she applied to a number of veterinary programs. I was one of her letter writers, and I just got the happy news that she was offered a place in Washington State University’s DVM program, a program she was really impressed with when she visited. Hannah will still be here in the area until July. I suggest having a party for Hannah sometime in the spring to give us all a chance to say farewell and best wishes, and to reaffirm that she’s part of our department ‘family’ whatever she does next. And I invite WHISC readers to help share news about other “alumni-lites” (feel free to suggest a better term!) -- and if you’re reading this and are one yourself, send in news!

Here’s a very recent selfie that Hannah took with a friendly cow.

Symposium of Cognition, Logic and Communication

The Eleventh International Symposium of Cognition, Logic and Communication was on December 10 and 11 at the University of Latvia in Riga. UMass alumna Suzi Lima, who gave the talk “Let Context Define What You Count," was an invited speaker. For more information, go here.

Joint Syntax Phonology Workshop on Friday

Joe Pater will present joint work with Jennifer Culbertson, Coral Hughto and Robert Staubs at a joint meeting of the syntax and phonology workshop this Friday at 2:30 in ILC N458. A title and abstract of his talk follow.

Title: Typological Prediction with Learning: Grammatical Agent-Based Modeling of Typology

Abstract: What effect does learning have on the typological predictions of a theory of grammar? One way to answer this question is to examine the output of agent-based models (ABMs), in which learning can shape the distribution over languages that result from agent interaction. Prior research on ABMs and language has tended to assume relatively simple agent-internal representations of language, with the goal of showing how linguistic structure can emerge without being postulated a priori (e.g. Kirby and Hurford 2002, Wedel 2007). In this paper we show that when agents operate with more articulated grammatical representations, typological skews emerge in the output of the models that are not directly encoded in the grammatical system itself. This of course has deep consequences for grammatical theory construction, which often makes fairly direct inferences from typology to properties of the grammatical system. We argue that abstracting from learning may lead to missed opportunities in typological explanation, as well as to faulty inferences about the nature of grammar. By adding learning to typological explanation, grammatical ABMs allow for accounts of typological tendencies, such as the tendency toward uniform syntactic headedness (Greenberg 1963, Dryer 1992). In addition, incorporating learning can lead to predicted near-zeros in typology. We show this with the case of unrealistically large stress windows, which can be generated by a weighted constraint system, but which have near-zero frequency in the output of our ABM incorporating the same constraints. The too-large-window prediction is one of the few in the extant literature arguing for Optimality Theory’s ranked constraints over weighted ones.

McCarthy named AAAS Fellow

John McCarthy has been made a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. For more information, go here.

Congratulations John!

Call for papers: Semantic Contribution of Det and Num

Workshop title: Semantic Contribution of Det and Num. (In)definiteness, genericity and referentiality 

May 27 and 28, 2016. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona  

Workshop description: 

The structure and interpretation of nominal phrases of different syntactic and semantic complexity have been among the most extensively studied topics in linguistics in the past decades. The literature has established various syntax-semantic mappings of noun phrases to express (in)definiteness and genericity across languages, stemming from the classical studies on the topics (Carlson 1977, Kamp 1981, Heim 1982). Much of the syntactic literature, adopting the DP Hypothesis of Abney (1987), has been devoted to the internal architecture of the DP (cf. Longobardi 1994, Zamparelli 2000, Borer 2005, Alexiadou 2014). Yet another much discussed issue is the derivation of referential properties of nominal phrases and the syntactic and semantic ingredients involved (e.g., articles, type-shifting, number specification, mass and count distinction, etc.) in building different types of referentiality (Chierchia 1998, Bouchard 2002, Dayal 2004, Cheng 2012, Aguilar-Guevara et al. 2014, Dobrovie-Sorin and Beyssade 2014, among many others). Recently, a number of experimental studies have been carried out which complement the theoretical investigation (cf. Ionin 2015). 

In this workshop we aim at bringing together researchers involved in the study of nominals, nominalization, genericity, specificity and indefiniteness in theoretical and experimental linguistics. We welcome work on formal syntax and semantics of nominal phrases in natural languages, focusing specifically on the role of Determiner(s) and Number in establishing referential properties of the nominal phrase. We also encourage submissions on experimental studies on production/processing and L1 and L2 acquisition of referentiality, article systems and genericity. 

Particular topics to be addressed in the workshop include, but are not limited to, questions like the following:

1.     What is the structure of nominal expressions in languages with and without articles?

2.      To what extent the count / mass distinction is related to the presence / absence of Number?

3       What is the semantic contribution of Det and Num? How is this contribution achieved in languages with no overt determiners and no Number specification?

4.      Why do languages that allow bare nominals and / or null articles also allow weak and expletive definites? How are these distinctions expressed in a language with no articles? What is the contribution to meaning of weak and expletive articles?

5.     Where is Number to be interpreted within the nominal domain? Is there a parametric distinction between languages that interpret Num on N and languages that interpret Num on D?

6.      How do different languages refer to kind entities? Should a distinction be made between kind entities and pluralities of individual objects? How do these differences relate to Number specification?

7.      What is the semantic contribution of indefinite determiners? What are the elements that make possible for an indefinite expression to contribute to indefiniteness, I-genericity or D-genericity?

8.      Is the taxonomic distinction between kinds and subkinds linguistically relevant? Which are the elements that may constrain linguistically either a kind or a subkind reading?

9.      How are nominal expressions interpreted at different stages in the acquisition of L1 and L2?10.    How does the interpretation of quantifiers interact with the funcional structure within the nominal domain, and more specifically with the presence / absence of a definite article? 

Invited speakers: 

Artemis Alexiadou (Humboldt University)

Tania Ionin (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Lisa Cheng (Leiden University)

Ora Matushansky (CNRS / Université de Paris 8)

Claire Beyssade (Université de Paris 8)

Florian Schwarz (University of Pennsylvania) 

Call for Papers

We invite abstracts for 45 minutes presentations (35-minute talk plus 10 minutes discussion) that address any of the topics above or related questions. Abstracts should be anonymous and not exceed 2 pages (A4 format), including examples and references, using a 12pt font with 2.5 cm (1 inch) margins on all for sides. Please send your abstracts electronically in pdf-format by December 15, 2015 to the following email address: cr.clt@uab.cat and include your name, affiliation and the title of the abstract in the body of the e-mail. 

Important dates

Deadline for abstract submission: December 15, 2015

Notification of acceptance: February 1, 2016

Final programme: February 29, 2016

Workshop: May 27-28, 2016 

Scientific committee: Artemis Alexiadou, Claire Beyssade, Olga Borik, Lisa Cheng, Sonia Cyrino, M.Teresa Espinal, Tania Ionin, Urtzi Etxeberria, Ora Matushansky, Florian Schwartz, Xavier Villalba. 

Organizers: Olga Borik and M.Teresa Espinal. Centre de Lingüística Teòrica. UAB. 

Call for papers: NISM 2016

We are very pleased to announce the first edition of the new series New Ideas in Semantics and Modeling 2016 (NISM2016), which will take place in Paris,  September 7 and 8, 2016.

The conferences New Ideas in Semantics and Modeling resume the Journées de Sémantique et Modélisation (JSM 2003-2010), targeting the renewed community in Formal Semantics and Pragmatics. Papers from any theoretical framework are welcome, granted that new empirical data are clearly complemented with a formal analysis. 

This year, the conference will feature a thematic session on definites, indefinites, demonstratives and referential terms, in honor of Francis Corblin, founder of the JSM.

Invited Speakers

Elizabeth Coppock (Gothenburg University & Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study)

Henriette de Swart (Utrecht University)

Paul Portner (Georgetown University)

François Recanati (Institut Jean-Nicod, ENS-EHESS-CNRS)

Organizers

Claire Beyssade (Structures Formelles du Langage, Paris 8 University)

Alda Mari (Institut Jean-Nicod, ENS-EHESS-CNRS)

David Nicolas (Institut Jean-Nicod, ENS-EHESS-CNRS)

Talks and posters

Talks will be 35 minutes, followed by 10 minutes for discussion.In addition to the general session, submissions are also invited for the special session on definites, indefinites, demonstratives and referential terms.The conference will also feature a poster session.

Abstract submission

Papers in formal semantics and pragmatics are welcome. Experimental papers are welcome, granted that they provide a formal analysis of the data. Abstracts (neither submitted nor published elsewhere) are limited to two per author, with at most one paper being single-authored. Abstracts, including references and data, should be limited to two single spaced pages (A4 or US Letter) with one inch margins, minimum font size 12pt (Times New Roman). They must be in PDF format. Examples should be interspersed throughout the text.Abstracts can be submitted in English or French, but the language of the conference will be English. Anonymous abstracts must be submitted online at http://nism2016.sciencesconf.org, by March 31, 2016.Abstracts will be triply blind-reviewed.

Proceedings

We plan to publish the proceedings of the conference.

Schedule

Deadline for abstract submission: March 31, 2016

Notification of acceptance: May 31, 2016

Conference : 7-8 September 2016

Call for papers: WSCLA 21

Richard Compton writes:

We are organizing the 21st Workshop on Structure and Constituency in Languages of the Americas (WSLCA) which will be held at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) this spring. Please see this flyer for more information.