LINGUIST List 12.533

Mon Feb 26 2001

Calls: Topic/Focus Workshop, Interlinguas Workshop

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Matthew Gordon, topic/focus workshop: 2nd call for papers
2. Stephen Helmreich, Fifth Workshop on Interlinguas

SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS

Topic and focus: a workshop on intonation and meaning

July 20-21, 2001

University of California, Santa Barbara
(in conjunction with the 2001 LSA Summer Institute)

Speakers:
Carlos Gussenhoven, Katholicke Universiteit, Nijmegen
Julia Hirschberg, AT+T Research Labs
Manfred Krifka, Humboldt University, Berlin
Mark Steedman, University of Edinburgh

The aim of this workshop is to explore the effects of various kinds of
topicalization and focus on intonation. It is especially hoped that
the workshop will lay the groundwork for future collaborative efforts
between linguists devoted to th= e study of meaning and linguists
engaged in the quantitative study of intonation. Bot= h descriptive
and theoretical papers on any aspects of the relationship between
intonation, on the one hand, and topic and/or focus, on the other
hand, are welcome. Talks will be 30 minutes with an additional 10
minutes for discussion. Papers may deal with intonational aspects of
topic and/or focus in all variety of languages including those which
are relatively underdocumented. Possible topics for discussion
include the following.

 theoretical work on topic and focus phenomena in particular languages
 experimental work on the perception and/or production of focus and topic
 phenomena
 the appropriate representation of intonational and semantic categories,
 including models of discourse
 cross-linguistic assessment of the required inventory of pragmatic
categories
 the relation between semantics and pragmatics in the study of focus and
topic phenomena
 the relation between the semantic categories and their prosodic
realization, and
 the influence of more general prosodic principles on it
 the justification of categories like focus and topic in the absence of
prosodic or morphological clues
 the categorical/gradient nature of the phonetic realization of intonation
contours associated with semantic categories

Abstracts should be a single page, with an additional page for
data/references if needed. Abstracts should be submitted
electronically and should include contact information (name,
affiliation, mailing address, email address, telephone number) in the
body of the mail. The abstract should either be pasted into the email
or should be an attachment (preferred formats are as an ASCII text
file or PDF). If these formats present problems, it is also possible
to attach an MSWord document. Email submissions should be sent to
tfworkshophumnet.ucla.edu.

Abstracts should be received by March 15, 2001. Notification of acceptance
will be
made by April 30, 2001. Further information about the workshop and the LSA
Institute is located at
www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/buring/tfworkshop/topicfocus.html and at
the Institute website at www.summer.ucsb.edu/lsa2001.
Inquiries about the workshop may be directed to the workshop organizers:
Matthew
Gordon, Daniel B=FCring, or Chungmin Lee by email at
tfworkshophumnet.ucla.edu

	Fifth Workshop on Interlinguas : Call for Papers

The call for papers for the Fifth Workshop on Interlinguas is
available at http://crl.nmsu.edu/Events/FWOI/FifthWorkshop/index.html

The goal of this workshop is to bring together specialists to work out
a practical, cross-language system of semantic relations for use in
representing events and states of affairs including, but not limited
to, participant relations (e.g., agent, patient, recipient,
benefactee, instrument, etc.), spatial relations (e.g., anterior,
posterior, superior, inferior, interior, etc.) and temporal relations
(e.g., prior-to, following, concurrent, etc.).

Papers are invited on:
 identifying systems of semantic relations and the linguistic devices
 for expressing them,

 methods for developing (or extending) such systems of relations,

 inferencing techniques for exploiting such systems of relations for
 particular MT tasks, such as

 disambiguation, 
 reference resolution,
 the recovery of ellipted information, 
 interpeting noun-noun compounds,
 metonymy and metaphor, etc. 

The workshop will be held on Saturday, September 22, 2001, in
conjunction with MT Summit VIII in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

Submission deadline: April 15, 2001

For further information, contact: 
Steve Helmreich or David Farwell
shelmreicrl.nmsu.edu davidcrl.nmsu.edu
505.646.2141			 505.646.5108