LINGUIST List 12.2129

Tue Aug 28 2001

Calls: Snippets, Negation/Nordic Journal of Ling

Editor for this issue: Jody Huellmantel <jodylinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Snippets, _Snippets_ syntax-semantics newsletter
2. Sten Vikner, NEGATION for Nordic J of Linguistics

Issue 4 of the syntax-semantics newsletter _Snippets_ is now out.
It is accessible at the web site

http://www.ledonline.it/snippets/

and hard copies are on their way to those institutions that requested
hard copies.

The contents of Issue 4 are:

1. Yves-Ferdinand Bouvier. Some audible effects of a silent operator.
2. Dirk Bury. German V3 and the origin of adverbs.
3. Uli Sauerland. Intermediate cumulation.
4. Gwangrak Son. Reflexives: a category defective in c-commanding ability.
5. Mark Volpe. The causative alternation and Japanese unaccusatives.

The deadline for submissions to Issue 5 is

* OCTOBER 15, 2001 *

- ----------------------------------------------------
 >From the SNIPPETS Editorial Statement:


The aim of _Snippets_ is to publish specific remarks that motivate
research or that make theoretical points germane to current work. The
ideal contribution is the ideal footnote: a side remark that taken on
its own is not worth lengthy development but that needs to be said.

......

We will publish notes that contribute to the study of _syntax and
semantics in generative grammar_. The notes are to be brief,
self-contained and explicit. They may do any of the following
things:

a. point out an empirical phenomenon that goes against accepted
generalizations or that shows that some aspect of a theory is
problematic;
b. point out unnoticed minimal pairs that fall outside the scope
of any existing theory;
c. point out an empirical phenomenon that confirms the
predictions of a theory in an area where the theory has not
been tested;
d. explicitly describe technical inconsistencies in a theory or
in a set of frequently adopted assumptions;
e. explicitly describe unnoticed assumptions that underlie a
theory or assumptions that a theory needs to be supplemented
with in order to make desired predictions;
f. propose an idea for a pilot experiment in language acquisition
or language processing that directly bears on theoretical
issues;
g. call attention to little-known or forgotten literature in
which issues of immediate relevance are discussed.

......

We will solicit submissions issue by issue. A new submission
deadline will be announced for each issue, and the submissions that
we receive we will consider only for that issue. The submissions
that we accept will be printed in the upcoming issue; none will be
scheduled for a later issue.

Submissions are to be a _maximum_ of 500 words (including examples),
with an additional half page allowed for diagrams, tables and
references. Given that we envision the submissions themselves as
footnotes, _the submissions may not contain footnotes of their own_.
The ideal submission is one paragraph; a submission of five lines is
perfectly acceptable. _We will not consider abstracts_.

We will accept electronic submissions at the address

snippetsunimi.it

Paper submissions should be sent to

Caterina Donati
Facolta' di Lingue
Universita' di Urbino
Piazza Rinascimento 7
61029 Urbino
ITALY

We strongly encourage electronic submissions. Electronic
submissions may take the form of the text of an e-mail message, or
an attached file. The attached file should be a simple text file,
a Word file (Mac or Windows), or a Rich Text Format (RTF) file.

All submissions must state the name and affiliation of the
author(s), and a (postal or electronic) return address.

 Call for papers: Special Issue on NEGATION
 -----------------=========================
The second issue of vol. 25 (2002) of the NORDIC JOURNAL OF 
LINGUISTICS will be a special issue devoted to NEGATION, 
edited by Anders Holmberg.

Negation is a universal category with more or less uniform semantics,
at least in the case of standard sentential negation. Nevertheless,
there is a surprising amount of cross-linguistic variation in the
syntactic expression of negation. In some languages the negation word
looks like an adverb (Scandinavian), in other languages like an
auxiliary verb (most Uralic languages), while in many other languages
it is a particle which looks like no other category. In many languages
it is a verb inflection, in many other languages it is a complex,
discontinuous category. Can all of this variation be derived from a
common underlying structure, or are there a limited number of basic
syntactic negation types? If there is a universal hierarchy of
functional categories, what is the position of negation in it? Does it
vary across languages? Are there several positions? Is negation a
value of a binary universal polarity category?

Some languages have negative quantifiers ("nothing", "nobody", etc.),
which in some languages have a special syntactic distribution
(Scandinavian), others do not have any. Does the existence of negative
quantifiers correlate with other properties of the grammar in general,
and negation in particular? Another long standing issue of controversy
is the syntax and semantics of negative polarity and negative concord,
and the relation between the two. Other interesting questions include
the nature of constituent negation and lexical negation ("without",
"deny", etc.), and the interaction of negation with mood, focus, and
other sentential functional categories.

We invite papers addressing these or any other syntactic or semantic
problem relating to negation. The deadline is January 31, 2002. The
papers should be sent to

 Anders Holmberg
 Department of Linguistics and English Language
 University of Durham
 Elvet Riverside 2
 Durham DH1 3JT
 United Kingdom

- --------------------------------------------------------
The instructions for authors can be found at the web site
 of the NORDIC JOURNAL OF LINGUISTICS:
 http://www.tandf.no/njling
- --------------------------------------------------------
 Sten Vikner +45 8942 6522 (direct)
 Dept. of English +45 8942 6500 (secr.)
 University of Aarhus +45 8942 6540 (fax)
 DK-8000 Aarhus C engsvhum.au.dk
 DENMARK http://www.hum.au.dk/engelsk/engsv
- --------------------------------------------------------