LINGUIST List 22.2083 Sun May 15 2011 Confs: General Linguistics/Netherlands Editor for this issue: Amy Brunett <brunettlinguistlist.org> New! Visit LL's Multitree project for over 1000 trees dynamically generated from scholarly hypotheses about language relationships:             http://multitree.linguistlist.org/ LINGUIST is pleased to announce the launch of an exciting new feature: Easy Abstracts! Easy Abs is a free abstract submission and review facility designed to help conference organizers and reviewers accept and process abstracts online. Just go to: http://www.linguistlist.org/confcustom, and begin your conference customization process today! With Easy Abstracts, submission and review will be as easy as 1-2-3! Directory         1.     Esrih Bakker , Representation of Gradability Message 1: Representation of Gradability Date: 13-May-2011 From: Esrih Bakker <j.e.bakkerhum.leidenuniv.nl> Subject: Representation of Gradability E-mail this message to a friend Representation of Gradability Date: 06-Jun-2011 - 07-Jun-2011 Location: Leiden, Netherlands Contact: Camelia Constantinescu Contact Email: c.constantinescuhum.leidenuniv.nl Meeting URL: http://hum.leiden.edu/lucl/gradability/ Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics Meeting Description: On 6 and 7 June LUCL will host a workshop on the representation of gradability, organized by members of the NWO VIDI-project Degrees across categories. The topic of this workshop is the formal representation of gradability as it shows up in natural language. Gradability is mostly discussed in the context of adjectives, where it is signaled by the use of certain degree modifiers or degree operators such as very. For example, tall is a gradable adjective, while parliamentary is not. Thus, one can be very tall, but a speech cannot be very parliamentary (cf. Bolinger 1972). Gradability is most often represented in terms of a degree argument (Cresswell 1976, Kennedy 1999, von Stechow 1984). Alternatively, it has been argued that gradability is uniquely based on the ordering between individuals in the set defined by the gradable predicate (Klein 1982, van Rooij 2008, van Rooij to appear, Doetjes, Constantinescu & Sou?ková to appear). Within both types of approaches several variants have been developed, and besides these, other proposals have been made in the recent literature, e.g. a representation in terms of vectors (Zwarts and Winter 2000, Faller 2000), tropes (Moltmann 2009), equivalence classes (Bale 2006, Neeleman, Van de Koot & Doetjes 2004) and analog magnitudes/ blurry degrees (cf. Fults 2006, ms.). This workshop aims at discussing and comparing ways in which gradability can be represented. Rather than limiting ourselves to the standard type of data (basically: gradable adjectives in English), we hope to get input from cross categorial as well as cross linguistic data. As already pointed out by Bolinger and even long before that by Sapir (1944), gradable expressions are not necessarily adjectival. Both nouns (idiot) and verbs (to appreciate) may be gradable. Comparing the noun idiot and the adjective idiotic, one can see that there is no complete parallel between these two domains. Take for instance the expression of high degree, which is expressed by very in the case of the adjective and by big in the case of the noun. It is by no means obvious whether very and big have exactly the same semantic function and whether they occupy the same position in the syntactic tree (cf. Morzycki 2009, who is one of the few authors who seriously tries to implement degrees into the nominal system). Likewise, the striking similarity between quantity modification and degree modification (cf. more, which is both a quantity expression as in more books and a degree operator as in more interesting) begs for an explanation. If there is a degree argument for gradable adjectives, does that mean that one would like to adopt a 'quantity' argument for plurals and mass nouns? Why are these elements sensitive to the presence of a part of relation ('monotonicity'), when combined with nouns as indicated by Schwarzschild (2006), while they can be combined with adjectives, even though adjectives lack such a structure? On the other hand, even within the adjectival domain, there is quite a lot of cross linguistic variation in the way comparison relations are expressed (Stassen 1985, Beck, Oda & Sugisaki 2004, Kennedy 2007). Beck, Oda & Sugisaki propose that there is variation among languages with respect to the syntax of degrees. Moreover, based on the cross-linguistic survey by Stassen, they raise the question whether all languages make use of degrees in their ontology. The important question then arises whether gradability is and should be uniformly represented cross-linguistically. Monday 6 June 09.00-09.20 Coffee and Registration 09.20-09.30 Introduction 09.30-10.35 Robert van Rooij (University of Amsterdam) Prototypes and the Predominance of Interval-scales 10.35-11.40 Alan Bale (Concordia University) Context and Multi-dimensional Adjectives 11.40-12.00 Break 12.00-13.05 Scott Fults (University of Maryland) Vagueness, Measurement, and Numbers 13.05-14.30 Lunch 14.30-15.35 Friederike Moltmann (CNRS, Université Paris 1) Gradability within a Trope-Based Approach 15.30-15.50 Break 15.50-16.55 Sigrid Beck (Universität Tübingen) TBA 16.55-18.00 Roger Schwarzschild (Rutgers University) The Marking of the Comparative 19.00 Dinner Tuesday 7 June 09.15-09.30 Coffee 09.30-10.35 Marcin Morzycki (Michigan State University) Flavors of Adnominal Degree Modification 10.35-11.40 Camelia Constantinescu, Jenny Doetjes, Kate?ina Sou?ková (Leiden University) Vague Predicates and the Representation of Gradable Nouns 11.40-12.00 Break 12.00-13.05 Rick Nouwen (Utrecht University) 'Quite' between Degree Modification and Exclamation 13.05-14.30 Lunch 14.30-15.35 Yoad Winter (Utrecht University) Adjective Modifiers and Modified Adjectives 15.30-15.50 Break 15.50-16.55 Joost Zwarts (Utrecht University) Measuring Time in Prepositional Phrases 16.55-18.00 Chris Kennedy (University of Chicago) Incremental Themes: 'Measuring out' is Measuring Change 19.00 Dinner Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue Page Updated: 15-May-2011       About LINGUIST    |   Contact Us       While the LINGUIST List makes every effort to ensure the linguistic relevance of sites listed on its pages, it cannot vouch for their contents.