LINGUIST List 22.3454 Thu Sep 01 2011 Calls: Comp Ling, Syntax, Semantics, Phonetics, Phonology/Germany Editor for this issue: Alison Zaharee <alisonlinguistlist.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.     Agata Renans , Information Structure: Empirical Perspectives on Theory Message 1: Information Structure: Empirical Perspectives on Theory Date: 01-Sep-2011 From: Agata Renans <renansuni-potsdam.de> Subject: Information Structure: Empirical Perspectives on Theory E-mail this message to a friend Full Title: Information Structure: Empirical Perspectives on Theory Date: 02-Dec-2011 - 03-Dec-2011 Location: Potsdam, Germany Contact Person: Mira Grubic Meeting Email: < click here to access email > Web Site: http://www.sfb632.uni-potsdam.de/~is-workshop/ Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Phonetics; Phonology; Semantics; Syntax Call Deadline: 23-Sep-2011 Meeting Description: The Collaborative Research Centre 632 ‘Information Structure’ at the University of Potsdam, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, and Freie Universität Berlin will host a graduate/postgraduate student conference on information structure on the 2nd and 3rd of December 2011. The conference aims to bring together Ph.D. students or advanced MA students (or equivalent) working on the empirical investigation of information structure and information structural categories. Interesting questions include, but are not limited to: - What information structural categories are necessary for describing, analysing, and modeling how information is structured or packaged in utterances: givenness/newness, focus, topic, contrast, frame setting (cf. Chafe 1976, Krifka 2008)? - How does one deal with optionality and redundancy in the grammatical marking of information structure? - How can information structure account for grammatical variation, e.g. word order variation in the left sentence periphery (a syntactic domain assumed to be important for the marking of IS categories, cf. e.g. Rizzi 1997)? - Are information structural categories gradable/continuous, e.g. can contrastive elements be more and less contrastive (e.g. Greif 2010), given elements more and less given (Hempelmann et al.'s (2005) newness scale), topics sole or conjoint (Cook & Bildhauer 2011)? - Cross-linguistically, which of the proposed categories have a measurable grammatical realisation? Are any of these categories universal? - How can different methods of psycholinguistics (e.g., experiments, field studies, etc.) tease apart which information structural categories facilitate language processing and how? How can difficulty in language processing be explained in terms of IS categories? - Which information structural categories (or sub-categories) can be reliably assigned using classification or clustering techniques? What knowledge is needed as input? Do categorizations differ with respect to difficulty? Regarding parallel corpora, how parallel are they with respect to information structural properties? Can information structural categories be projected from one language to another? Invited Speakers: Manfred Krifka, Humboldt Universität (Awaiting confirmation) Others: to be announced Call for Papers: Submissions may include but are not limited to studies from the fields of syntax, semantics, phonetics/phonology and their interfaces to information structure. We are interested in results obtained from a variety of different data types and methods, e.g. corpora, experimental data, or data from field work. Our goal is to reach a better understanding of information structural categories and their grammatical representation and surface realisation. We invite anonymous 1 page abstracts (references, examples and figures can be on a second page) for 30 minute presentations. Submissions should be in the following format: pdf format, A4 size, single spacing, the font must not be smaller than 12pt, at least 2,5cm margins on all sides. The name of the pdf file should be the title of the abstract: title.pdf The body of the email should contain the following information: Name(s) of author(s) Title of talk Affiliation(s) E-mail address(es) Important Dates: Deadline for abstract submissions: 23. September 2011 Notification of acceptance: 10. October 2011 Workshop: 02./03. December 2011 Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue Page Updated: 01-Sep-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.