LINGUIST List 4.1038

Thu 09 Dec 1993

Confs: Morphology-Syntax, Contrast in phonology, FOCUS & NLP

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Colin Phillips, Posting
2. C. Dyck, Phonology conf. on CONTRAST
3. ROB VAN DER SANDT, focus conference

 MORPHOLOGY-SYNTAX CONNECTION
 MIT, 4th-5th January 1993

 ***NEW & CHANGED INFORMATION***

As a result of the unexpectedly high interest in the Morphology-Syntax
Connection Workshop, we've been forced to make a couple of changes to the
details posted to LINGUIST earlier.

1. The workshop has been moved to a new (larger) room: MIT Room 3-270.
E-mail Heidi Harley, hharleymit.edu for directions/map.

2. There will be an on-site registration fee. $5 for students, $10 for
others.

3. The reason for talks not beginning until 3:30pm on the 5th is to minimize
overlap with the Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop being held at Harvard
on the 5th-6th.

4. Reduced rate rooms are available at the Harvard Manor House, 110 Mt.
Auburn Street, Cambridge, if booked by **December 14th**. $80 per room
per night. Call (617)-864-5200, or toll-free 1-800-458-5886

Colin Phillips & Heidi Harley

Announcing the MOT Conference on

CONTRAST IN PHONOLOGY

FEBRUARY 4-6, 1994
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
SECOND NOTICE: PLEASE CIRCULATE
FRIDAY EVENING, FEBRUARY 4
6:30 Registration
I. Opening session: Ed Burstynsky, Chair and Opening Remarks
7:00-7:45 Elan Dresher, (Toronto) Glyne Piggott (McGill), Keren
Rice
(Toronto): Overview paper
7:45-8:30 Donca Steriade (UCLA): On defining potentially
contrastive gestures
8:45 Reception in Linguistics Department, Robarts Library
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 5
8:30 Registration
II. Contrast in the prosodic domain
9:00- 9:45 Patricia Shaw (UBC): The contrast between full and
reduced vowels
9:45-10:30 Carrie Dyck (Toronto): Contrast and the
interpretation of empty vowels in Spanish dialects
10:30-10:45 Break
10:45-11:30 William Idsardi (Delaware): Prosodic contrasts and
Optimality Theory
11:30-12:00 Joe Pater (McGill): Against the underlying
specification of an TexceptionalU English stress pattern
12:00-12:30 Discussion: Henrietta Hung (Ottawa), moderator
12:30-2:15 Lunch
III. Contrast in loan words
2:15-3:00 Carole Paradis & Caroline Lebel: Contrasts from
segmental parameter settings: core and periphery in loan words
IV. Contrast in sign language
3:00-3:45 Harry van der Hulst (Leiden): Head-dependent
asymmetries in the phonology of two-handed signs
3:45-4:00 Break
4:00-4:45 Wendy Sandler (Haifa): On the role of the nondominant
hand in sign language phonology
4:45-5:30 David Perlmutter (Rochester): The role of contrast in
establishing phonological representations: segmental structure
in American Sign Language
5:30-6:30 Discussion: Peter Avery, (York) moderator
SATURDAY EVENING, FEBRUARY 5
Supper and Party
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 6
V. Contrast in the segmental domain
9:00- 9:45 Heather Goad (McGill): Front vowels are not coronal
9:45-10:30 Sharon Rose (McGill): Guttural contrasts
10:30-10:45 Break
10:45-11:30 Douglas Pulleyblank (UBC): Lexical specification of
[ATR] in Optimality Theory
11:30-12:00 Hubert Truckenbrodt (MIT): Entailments and
shadows of markedness: context-sensitive underspecification
12:00-12:45 Glyne Piggott (McGill): Meinhoff's Law and the
determination of nasal- oral contrast
12:45-2:00 Pizza and Discussion: Greg Lamontagne (Toronto),
moderator
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
This is the revised program of the MOT Conference on Contrast in
Phonology. Any inquiries about the conference should be addressed
to Keren Rice or Elan Dresher at lingdeptepas.utoronto.ca, or phone
(416) 978-4029, fax (416) 978-8821.
All talks will be held at St. Vladimir Institute, 620 Spadina Ave.
A close hotel is the JourneyUs End Motel, 280 Bloor Street West, (416)
968-0010 or (800) 668-4200. The University of Toronto rate is
$72.68 per night (tax included). Make your reservations early, and
specify that you are with the University of Toronto conference on
Contrast in Phonology. Limited crash space is available; contact
cdyckepas.utoronto.ca.
Registration fee: $10.00 Canadian. Please register by January 28
(you can register by e-mail (lingdeptepas.utoronto.ca) and pay your
registration fee on arrival).
Sponsored by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada

FOCUS AND NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING

Interdisciplinary Conference in Celebration of the 10th Anniversary of the
Journal of Semantics
Schloss Wolfsbrunnen, near Kassel, Germany
12th-15th June, 1994

Some of the more important developments in Natural Language Semantics during the
 last ten years have taken place in the study of discourse. This development
 has made clear, however, that the complexity and the amount of data relevant in
 processing discourse are greater than formal and computationally tractable
 approaches could cope with. There is a great need to find ways of partitioning
 the data according to the informational requirements of particular processing
 steps, i.e., for one or the other form of focusing.
 Focusing in this sense has probably first caught general attention in
 connection with presupposition and anaphora, but the phenomenon is much more
 widely spread. For no actual occurrence of a lexical item in a discourse do we
 need or want the full information that the lexicon and conceptual
 representation offer; the discourse context, together with the syntactic
 context, will rather focus on a particular subset of the available information.
 Similarly in the inferential processes required in text processing we will
 never want access to the entire database, but a theorem prover will need to be
 provided with just the right set of premises; not just in order to be more
 efficient, but merely to yield correct results.
 What makes focusing particularly promising is that it has fairly clear
 correlates in syntactic and phonological observations, as well as in cognitive
 processes.

SCOPE OF THE CONFERENCE
We are interested in theoretical papers as well as in studies of specific data.
 Computational approaches are welcome, from Computational Linguistics as well as
 Artificial Intelligence; so are straightforward linguistic approaches and
 psycholinguistic work.

TOPICS OF INTEREST
 accessibility of discourse entities
 structure of lexical information
 topic-comment structure
 presuppositional structure
 centering
 plans and goals in discourse
 point of view, relevance
 thematic discourse structure
 segmentation of discourse
 structuring and partitioning of conceptual representations
 intonation focus
 syntactic focus
 focus particles
 quantification and focus

SUBMISSION OF PAPERS
Intending participants are invited to submit a two to three page extended
 abstract,
to arrive by 4th February 1994 to the Conference Chair. Email submission is
 welcome, but only in ASCII format. Papers are judged by the contribution they
 make to the understanding of focus structures and processes. Abstracts will be
 refereed by members of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Semantics (i.e.,
 Nicholas Asher, Renate Bartsch, Johan van Benthem, Bran Boguraev, Peter Bosch,
 David Bree, Herbert Brekle, Gillian Brown, Oesten Dahl, Simon Garrod, Bart
 Geurts, Michael Herweg, Paul Hopper, Larry Horn, Steven Isard, Phil
 Johnson-Laird, Hans Kamp, Tibor Kiss, Ewald Lang, Steve Levinson, Sebastian
 Loebner, Sir John Lyons, Alexis Manaster-Ramer, William Marslen-Wilson, Jim
 McCawley, Leo Noordman, Rob van der Sandt, Tony Sanford, Remko Scha, Helmut
 Schnelle, Pieter Seuren, Arnim von Stechow, Mark Steedman, Wolfgang Wahlster,
 Bonnie Webber, and Henk Zeevat).
Notification of acceptance by 4th March, 1994. Publication of conference papers
 is planned for early 1995.

INVITED GUEST SPEAKERS
Nicholas Asher, Anton Batliner, Carlos Gussenhoven, Joachim Jacobs, Manfred
 Krifka, Barbara Partee, Ellen Prince, Mats Rooth, Arnim von Stechow, Mark
 Steedman (others not yet confirmed).

CONFERENCE CO-CHAIRS
Peter Bosch (IBM Germany) & Rob van der Sandt (University of Nijmegen)
Correspondence to:
Peter Bosch, Managing Editor, Journal of Semantics, IBM Germany, Scientific
 Centre, PO Box 103068,D-69115 Heidelberg, Germany
fax: (+49-6221-)593500 phone: (+49-6221-)594251
email: boschvnet.ibm.com

CONFERENCE SECRETARY
Christine Harms c/o GMD, Schloss Birlinghoven D-53757 Sankt Augustin, Germany.
fax:(+49-2241-) 142472 phone: (+49-2241-) 142473
email: christine.harmsgmd.de