LINGUIST List 18.632
Tue Feb 27 2007
Calls: General Linguistics/UK; Phonolog/France
Editor for this issue: Ania Kubisz
<anialinguistlist.org>
Directory
1. Patrick
Honeybone,
Linguistics Association of Great Britain Meeting 2007
2. Te-hsin
Liu,
Problems with surface-based generalizations
Message 1: Linguistics Association of Great Britain Meeting 2007
Date: 26-Feb-2007
From: Patrick Honeybone <patrick.honeyboneed.ac.uk>
Subject: Linguistics Association of Great Britain Meeting 2007
Full Title: Linguistics Association of Great Britain Meeting 2007 Short Title: LAGB 2007
Date: 29-Aug-2007 - 01-Sep-2007 Location: King's College London, United Kingdom Contact Person: Devyani Sharma
Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics
Call Deadline: 09-Apr-2007
Meeting Description:
The 2007 Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain will be held at King's College London, from 29th August to 1st September. The local organisers will be Devyani Sharma, Eleni Gregoromichelaki, and Suzanne LaBelle. The Meeting will last four days and will feature several special events, including two invited speakers and an invited Language Tutorial.
Full details of the meeting, student bursaries and instructions for abstract submission can be found in the full first circular for the conference, which can be downloaded from the LAGB's website:
http://www.lagb.org.uk/circulars/2007_1kclcirc.pdf
More information available at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/lagb - currently under construction.
Abstracts are welcome from both members and non-members.
Special Events:
1. The Henry Sweet Lecture 2007 will be delivered by Professor Hans Kamp (University of Stuttgart) on the evening of 29th August (title to be confirmed).
2. The Linguistics Association Lecture 2007 will be delivered by Professor B. Elan Dresher (University of Toronto) on 1st September, with the title 'The contrastive hierarchy in phonology'.
3. There will also be a Workshop on Discourse Representation Theory, related to the Henry Sweet lecture, on the afternoon of 31st August.
4. There will also be a special themed session on 1st September, related to the Linguistics Association Lecture, with the title 'Contrast in Phonology', for which abstracts are now invited. These should be submitted in the same way as abstracts for the general sessions, but should be clearly marked that they are intended for the special session. For further details, see the call for papers for this session on the page 5 of the full circular, and included at the end of this message.
5. There will be a Language Tutorial on Slavey, given by Professor Keren Rice (University of Toronto).
6. There will be a session organised by the LAGB's Education Committee which will feature a discussion of how linguists in Higher Education communicate with teachers and pupils in schools. Details will be announced in the second circular and posted on www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/ec/ecsessions.htm.
7. There will be a workshop on 'Syntactic Microvariation in Dialects of English', for which abstracts are now invited. These should be submitted in the same way as abstracts for the general sessions, but should be clearly marked that they are intended for the workshop. For further details, see the call for papers for this session on page 5 of the full circular, and included at the end of this message.
The meeting will be directly followed by an independently organised Workshop on Features. For further details, see the call for papers for this session on page 6 of the full circular, and included at the end of this message.
Deadline for abstracts: 9th April. For details of abstract submission, see the full first circular - abstracts may be submitted either electronically or in hard copy; sets of abstracts may be submitted together for a themed session of your choice. Electronic submission of abstracts is preferred.
Call for papers for the themed session at the 2007 LAGB meeting, related to the Linguistics Association Lecture by B. Elan Dresher on 'Contrast in Phonology'.
It is a phonological commonplace that contrast is fundamental to phonology, but quite how this should be implemented in phonological theory remains contentious. Abstracts would be welcome which connect in any way with the issues that arise from a consideration of the role of contrast (and of contrasts of different types) in phonology.
Some relevant questions are (in part adapted from the material written by B. Elan Dresher and Keren Rice, and available here: www.chass.utoronto.ca/~contrast/). - How should the role of contrast be conceived in phonology? How should it be represented? - Is there a relation between the amount of segmental complexity a system allows and the number and nature of contrasts it has? - Which features and contrasts are marked and which are unmarked, and what diagnostics should we use to decide this question? - Do noncontrastive features play any role in the phonology of a language?
Abstracts are now invited for this session. They should be submitted in the same way as abstracts for the general sessions, but should be clearly marked that they are intended for this special themed session.
Call for papers for the workshop at the 2007 LAGB meeting on 'Syntactic Microvariation in Dialects of English', organised by Marika Lekakou and Karen Corrigan.
In the recent past the study of dialect syntax has received renewed interest from different perspectives (sociolinguistics, theoretical linguistics, language typology, traditional dialectology, historical linguistics). Particularly exciting is the recent development of extended co-operation among scholars within these fields, which has led to a more interdisciplinary approach to the study of the syntactic properties of dialects. This new development is reflected in, among other things, the contributions in Cornips and Corrigan (eds), Syntax and Variation: Reconciling the Biological and the Social. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005.
Concomitantly, a number of dialect syntax projects have already been launched or even completed across Europe, which have the property of combining different theoretical backgrounds (for example, theoretical linguistics employing sociolinguistically informed methodology of data collection). Examples of this European tendency can be found in for instance Italy (ASIS, http://asis-cnr.unipd.it/index.en.html), Portugal (CORDIAL-SIN, http://www.clul.ul.pt/english/sectores/cordialsin/projecto_cordialsin.html), Scandinavia (ScanDiaSyn, http://uit.no/scandiasyn/?Language=en), and the Netherlands and Belgium (SAND, www.meertens.nl/sand). The Netherlands is also the home of the currently running ESF-funded Edisyn project (www.meertens.nl/projecten/edisyn). The Edisyn aspires to set up, extend and develop cooperation among dialect syntax projects in Europe, thus yielding a European network of dialect syntacticians that use similar standards with respect to methodology of data collection, data storage and annotation, data retrieval and cartography.
Currently, existing dialectal variation in varieties of English has not been explored in a systematic way, in the sense that a large-scale dialect syntax project has not yet been undertaken (the FRED project (http://www.anglistik.uni-freiburg.de/institut/lskortmann/) which ran at the University of Freiburg has resulted in a corpus of dialect data from previous generations). We aim to host a workshop with the aim of bringing together scholars who are interested in collaboration that will ultimately lead to the launch of a UK and Ireland branch of the Edisyn project. We therefore invite contributions on any aspect of the syntax of English dialects.
Abstracts are now invited for this session. They should be submitted in the same way as abstracts for the general sessions, but should be clearly marked that they are intended for this workshop.
This year's LAGB meeting overlaps with the second conference of the UK Cognitive Linguistics Association. If members would like to attend both, the committee will be sure to take this into account, if necessary, when scheduling talks. If this is likely to affect you, please indicate this in the message accompanying your abstract.
Workshop on Features, 1-2 September 2007 King's College London in association with the 2007 LAGB meeting
Linguistic fields: General Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Language Description, Linguistic Theories, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, Typology
Meeting Summary:
The Workshop on Features (1-2 September 2007) will be associated with and will directly follow the LAGB 2007 conference at King's College London. Abstracts should be submitted, and will be considered separately to those intended for the LAGB meeting. The Workshop will bring together linguists who have grappled with features as a component of theoretical models together with others who have considered their range and variability in the world's languages.
Details:
In attempting to understand language, a central notion is features. Examples are person (1st, 2nd, 3rd), number (singular, plural, dual...) tense (present, past...), and inflectional class (I, II, III, IV...). Features have proven invaluable for analysis and description, and have a major role in contemporary linguistics, right across the range of the discipline. Yet little is firmly established about features: we have no readily available inventory of which features are found in the world's languages, no generally agreed account of how they operate across different components of language and no certainty on how they interact. Features are widely used, but are little discussed. The workshop will therefore bring together linguists who have grappled with features as a component of theoretical models together with others who have considered their range and variability in the world's languages.
There will be six guest speakers who have agreed to talk on the following topics: - David Adger 'Features and functional categories' - Peter Austin 'Features and clause linkage' - Ann Copestake 'Features and computational semantics' - Ron Kaplan 'Formal aspects of underspecified features' - Maria Polinsky 'Featural asymmetries in long-distance agreement: why gender is different from person' - Ivan Sag 'Feature geometry and predictions of locality'
The programme organisers of the Workshop are Greville Corbett and Anna Kibort, Surrey Morphology Group (www.surrey.ac.uk/LIS/SMG/). The Workshop is supported by the ESRC, within a project on Grammatical Features (grant number RES-051-27-0122). The local organisers of the LAGB meeting at King's College London, Devyani Sharma and Eleni Gregoromichelaki, have kindly agreed to take on the local arrangements.
Contact: Anna Kibort Contact e-mail: a.kibortsurrey.ac.uk), by or on 9th April 2007
Current and recent LAGB circulars can always be downloaded from this address:
http://www.lagb.org.uk/meetings.htm
Message 2: Problems with surface-based generalizations
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Date: 26-Feb-2007
From: Te-hsin Liu <liu.tehsingmail.com>
Subject: Problems with surface-based generalizations
Full Title: Problems with surface-based generalizations
Date: 08-Oct-2007 - 09-Oct-2007 Location: Paris, France Contact Person: Te-hsin Liu Meeting Email: phonoparis8yahoo.fr Web Site: http://home.kimo.com.tw/tehsinl/
Linguistic Field(s): Phonology
Call Deadline: 07-Apr-2007
Meeting Description: Since the advent of Optimality Theory (OT) advocating the replacement of rules by violable constraints, this model faces a number of challenges that appear to be related to its initial commitment to evaluating a set of surface 'candidates'. One problem is that we have no satisfactory criterion as to which and how many candidates should be evaluated for a given input. As is shown by Steriade's (2001) work on the typology of repairs for the constraint against voiced stops, the only repair attested for violations of such a constraint is final devoicing. Other potential strategies, such as nasalization, syncope, metathesis and epenthesis, are not attested. While syncope and epenthesis are frequent processes among languages, they are never chosen as repair strategies for final obstruent voicing. However, standard OT has no way to rule out these possibilities elegantly, and this is far from being the only problem for the theory. In order to account for problematic opacity facts, several attempts have been proposed. Thus, Calabrese (2005) proposes to re-establish serialism, the principle at the heart of classical generative phonology. On the contrary, Carvalho & Klein (2006) suggest developing a theory of the input, arguing that phonological representations should explain the reasons of the variable behaviour of speakers vis-à-vis opacity. We organize a two-day workshop, addressing any topic related with the above issues, couched in any theoretical framework. The empirical domains can include loanwords, word games, sociolinguistic variation, etc. Speakers will have the opportunity to present a 20-minute talk, followed by 10 minutes of discussion.
Depuis l'avènement de la théorie de l'optimalité (OT) qui prône le remplacement des règles par des contraintes violables, la phonologie se trouve face à des défis qui résultent de son engagement initial, fondé sur l'évaluation d'un ensemble de 'candidats' de surface. Comme le démontre le travail de Steriade (2001) portant sur la typologie des stratégies de réparation de la contrainte interdisant les codas voisées, la seule réparation attestée est le dévoisement final. D'autres stratégies potentielles, telles la nasalisation, la syncope, la métathèse ou l'épenthèse, ne sont pas attestées. Alors que l'épenthèse et la syncope sont des processus fréquents dans les langues, ils ne sont jamais choisis comme stratégie de réparation pour éviter une coda voisée. Or OT standard est incapable d'exclure ces possibilités d'une façon élégante. Et ceci est loin d'être la seule difficulté rencontrée par la théorie. Plusieurs tentatives ont eu lieu qui essaient d'apporter une solution au problème posé à OT par l'opacité. Ainsi Calabrese (2005) propose de rétablir le sérialisme, le principe central de la phonologie générative classique. De leur côté, Carvalho & Klein (2006) suggèrent de développer une théorie de l'input, seul à même d'expliquer les raisons du comportement variable des locuteurs. Nous organisons un colloque de deux jours, portant essentiellement, mais non obligatoirement, sur des sujets en rapport avec les problématiques ci-dessus, et sans exclusive de cadre théorique. Les domaines empiriques possibles iraient jusqu'à inclure les jeux de mots, les emprunts, la variation socio-linguistique, etc. Nous sollicitons la soumission de résumés pour une présentation de 20 minutes, suivie de 10 minutes de discussion.
Format of abstracts: - an anonymous text no longer than two pages in either French or English; - page format: A4, 2,5 cm margins on all four sides, 12-point font, simple line spacing; - the body of the message contains the title of the presentation proposed as well as the name, the affiliation, and the electronic address of all authors; - the abstract, in PDF format, is attached to the message.
La procédure de soumission se présente de la manière suivante: - résumé anonyme de 2 pages maximum rédigé en français ou en anglais; - format: A4, marges d'au moins 2,5 cm de chaque côté, police taille 12, interligne simple; - le corps du message contiendra le titre de la communication proposée, ainsi que le nom, l'affiliation, et l'adresse électronique de chacun des auteurs; - le résumé sera transmis sous la forme d'un fichier PDF attaché à ce message.
Invited speakers/Conférenciers invités: Larry Hyman (University of California, Berkeley) Haike Jacobs (University Nijmegen) Sharon Peperkamp (Université de Paris 8) Tobias Scheer (Université de Nice)
Advisory board/Comité scientifique: Joaquim Brandão de Carvalho Marc Klein Michela Russo Sophie Wauquier
Organizing Committee/Comité d'organisation: Kadija Aboufarah Te-hsin Liu Marcela San Giacomo
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