Full Title: 56th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistics Society
Short Title: NELS 56

Date: 17-Oct-2025 - 19-Oct-2025
Location: New York, USA
Contact Person: Gary Thoms
Meeting Email: [email protected]
Web Site: https://wp.nyu.edu/artsampscience-nels56/

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics

Call Deadline: 08-Jun-2025

Call for Papers:

We are pleased to announce that the 56th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistics Society (NELS 56) will be hosted by New York University in New York, New York, from October 17 to October 19, 2025. The invited speakers are:
- Sam Alxatib (The City University of New York)
- Tanya Bondarenko (Harvard University)
- Sharon Rose (UC San Diego)
- Jim Wood (Yale University)

Please note that the deadline for submissions has been delayed slightly, and the new final submission date is June 8th 2025.

We invite abstracts for 20-minute talks and posters on any theoretical or formal aspect of natural language, including but not limited to phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and their interfaces. Within the conference, there will be a special session on the topic 'Idiosyncrasy and grammar', which submitters can elect to put their abstract forward for upon submitting. See below for more information on the special session.

Abstract Guidelines:

Abstracts, including references and data, must not exceed two A4 or letter pages, have 2.54 cm (1 inch) margins on all sides, and be set in Times New Roman with a font size no smaller than 11pt. Examples, tables, graphs, etc. must be interspersed into the text of the abstract, and not collected at the end. The submission must not reveal the identity of the author(s) in any way. Submissions are limited to two per author, with at most one paper being single-authored. Abstracts must be submitted in PDF format through the NELS 56 abstract submission page on Oxford Abstracts by June 8th, 2025 at 23:59 Eastern Daylight Time (UTC-4).

Note: NELS 56 will give preference to new work. For this reason, authors will be asked on the Oxford Abstracts submission page to indicate if your work is under review for publication or has been accepted for presentation at another major conference.

Timeline:

Submission deadline: June 8th, 2025 at 23:59 Eastern Daylight Time (UTC-4)
Notification of decisions: mid July
Conference dates: October 17th-19th, 2025.

Conference venue: New York University, Washington Square campus, New York City
Meeting email: [email protected]

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Special session on "Idiosyncrasy and grammar"

Most of our efforts in linguistic theory are directed towards understanding the nature of productive linguistic processes, and idiosyncrasies are often understood as being a matter for the lexicon. In phonological theory, there is a focus on the characterization of the "phonology proper", while exceptional forms are taken to be stored in representations that don't impact upon the phonological grammar of a given language directly; in semantics, the principle of compositionality directs our focus towards compositional processes of maximal generality, with lexical semantic effects being explained in terms of lexical semantic decomposition in syntax, the theorist's main job is to understand the workings of fundamental operations such as Merge and Agree, and exceptional patterns playing a minor role (if any) in guiding the broader theoretical issues. In these domains, the focus is typically on the 'core', with less attention to the 'periphery'.

Things are a bit different in the domain of morphological theory, where the focus is on listemes and their relationship to other modules; in this area, determining the nature of idiosyncrasies is a core research objective, with major consequences for theory comparison at the framework level. Consider the case of suppletive allomorphy, which is where we see both regular and idiosyncratic forms for what seems to be one and the same syntactic element: the past 15 years has seen a surge in work on the characterization of suppletion, in particular in the wake of Bobaljik's (2012) groundbreaking work on comparatives and superlatives, and advances in theories of morphology have been driven by this work as the structural conditions on allomorph selection have been refined on the basis of a broadening understanding of the empirical patterns into other domains (Embick 2010; Merchant 2015; Smith et al. 2019; Paparounas 2024; Bešlin 2025; Angelopoulos & Spyropoulos to appear). Relevant for our understanding of these phenomena is the delimitation of different classes of allomorphy, as in some instances we might find that suppletion misnames cases where there is syntactic non-identity (see e.g. Kayne 2018 on 'se'-based possessive clitics in Romance), and in others there may be more of a role for phonology in determining the range of possible forms than we had realized at first (e.g. Scheer 2016, Newell 2023).

In a similar vein, another branch of research in the Distributed Morphology framework has sought to capture patterns of syncretism, where we see regularity of form but a range of distinct meanings, in terms of allosemy, whereby there is 'late insertion at LF' of context-specific denotations (Wood 2012, 2013, 2016, 2022; Marantz 2013; Myler 2016; Wood & Marantz 2017; Kastner 2020). These issues have been given a particularly sharp treatment in Wood's (2023) book on Icelandic nominalizations, in which Wood breathes new life into old questions from Chomsky (1970) about how lexical idiosyncrasies might shape our view of the architecture of the grammar. The allosemy outlook is a natural extension of the treatment of phrasal idioms such as 'kick the bucket', and so it is fitting to consider the consequences for this work of recent developments in the study of idioms. Bruening (2010) proposes a theory of idiom formation based on selectional contiguity, and pursuing this work has reinvigorated old debates on the status of functional projections with respect to selection (see e.g. Bruening et al. 2018). Bruening's work builds on work on ditransitives by Harley (1995, 2002) and Richards (2001), in which recurrence of idiomatic meaning with distinct predicates has been used to argue for lexical decomposition, while the recent response to Bruening's work in Larson (2017) seeks to reassess the distinction between idioms and collocations, paying special attention to the partial compositionality of some idiomatic expressions. Partial compositionality has also been taken to have some role to play in determining the extent to which a given passive can participate in passivization and relativization (Nunberg et al. 1994, cf. Lebeaux 2009, Folli & Harley 2007, McGinnis 2002), although more recent work that has diversified the discussion with data from beyond English (Wierzba et al. 2023) indicates that the picture may be more complicated than that.

Our understanding of the division between the 'core' and the 'periphery' has also been reconfigured by Yang's (2016) work on productivity, in which Yang proposes a calculus, the Tolerance Principle, for determining whether or not a potential rule of their grammar is to become part of the learner's productive grammar. Yang's work puts a great deal of stock in evidence from acquisition for what does and does not constitute a truly productive rule, with overregularization ('gived', 'mouses') as the signature of the acquisition of a productive rule; on this account, and the scarcity of 'overirregularization' (overgeneralization from irregular forms, e.g. 'brung') in child data tells us that minority rules that the analyst may posit may not, in fact, be true rules of the grammar, with substantial implications for how we assess the boundary between regular rules and `lexicalized' exceptions. The Tolerance Principle has been applied to a number of domains with some success (Belth et al. 2021; Kodner 2020, 2022; Belth to appear; Thoms et al. 2025), but there is a tension between this work and other results in work which suggest that sublexical generalizations may explain patterns in the phonological selectiveness of certain affixation processes (Gouskova et al. 2015, Gouskova 2025). These competing theories differ fundamentally in how they treat irregularity in morphophonology, and it remains to be seen what empirical phenomena in other domains might be brought to bear on the matter.

The purpose of this special session at NELS 56 is to bring researchers together to discuss these issues and make progress on the broader theoretical issues that they impact upon. Potential topics of discussion include but are not limited to:
- the structural conditioning of suppletive allomorphy
- the status of allosemy and structurally-conditioned idiosyncratic meanings more broadly
- the syntax of idioms and collocations and the line between them
- productivity, minority rules and idiosyncratic forms
- lexical specificity effects in syntax and how to model them
- the syntactic and semantic properties of roots
- the border between compositional and idiosyncratic components of lexical meaning
- overirregularization and sublexical generalization
- idiosyncrasy as a diagnostic for distinct classes (e.g. clitic vs affix)
- psycholinguistic properties of regular vs irregular processes

We welcome work from a range of different research traditions, including psycholinguistics, computational linguistics and acquisition.

References:

Angelopoulos, Nikos, Vassilios Spyropoulos. to appear. The Ups and Downs of Pruning: Reply to Paparounas (2024). Linguistic Inquiry.
Belth, Caleb. to appear. Learning-Based Account of Phonological Tiers. Linguistic Inquiry.
Belth, Caleb, Sarah Payne, Deniz Beser, Jordan Kodner, & Charles Yang. 2021. The Greedy and Recursive Search for Morphological Productivity. In Proceedings of the 43th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci). 43: 2869-2875.
Bešlin, Maša. 2025. Lexical categories, (re)categorization, and locality in morphosyntax. PhD, University of Maryland.
Bobaljik, Jonathan David. 2012. Universals in comparative morphology: suppletion, superlatives and the structure of words. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bruening, Benjamin. 2010. Ditransitive asymmetries and a theory of idiom formation. Linguistic Inquiry 41, 519-562.
Bruening, Benjamin, Xuyen Dinh, Lan Kim. 2018. Selection, idioms, and the structure of nominal phrases with and without classifiers. Glossa 3(1): 1-46.
Chomsky, Noam. 1970. Remarks on nominalization. In Studies on semantics in generative grammar, 11–61. The Hague: Mouton.
Embick, David. 2010. Localism versus Globalism in Morphology and Phonology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Folli, Raffaella, Heidi Harley. 2007. Causation, obligation, and argument structure: On the nature of little v. Linguistic Inquiry 38: 197-238.
Gouskova, Maria. 2025. Phonological selection in small sublexicons. Proceedings of Annual Meeting on Phonology 2023-2024. Edited by Gerard Avelino, Merlin Balihaxi, Quartz Colvin, Vincent Czarnecki, Hyunjung Joo, Chenli Wang, Utku Zorbarlar, Adam Jardine, Adam McCollum.
Gouskova, Maria, Luiza Newlin-Łukowicz, and Sofya Kasyanenko. 2015. Selectional restrictions as phonotactics over sublexicons. Lingua 167, pp. 41-81.
Harley, Heidi. 1995. Subjects, Events and Licensing. PhD, MIT.
Harley, Heidi. 2002. Possession and the double object construction. Linguistic Variation Yearbook 2: 29--68.
Kastner, Itamar. 2020. Voice at the Interfaces: The syntax, semantics and morphology of the Hebrew verb. Berlin: Language Science Press.
Kodner, Jordan. 2020. Language Acquisition in the Past. PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania.
Kodner, Jordan. 2022. Language Acquisition Guiding Theory and Diachrony: A Case Study from Latin Morphology. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 41:733–792.
Larson, Richard K. 2017. On ``dative idioms'' in English. Linguistic Inquiry 48: 389-426.
Lebeaux, David. 2009. Where does the binding theory apply? Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Marantz, Alec. 2013. Locality domains for contextual allomorphy across the interfaces. In Ora Matushansky
& Alec Marantz (eds.), Distributed Morphology Today: Morphemes for Morris Halle, 95–115. MIT Press.
McGinnis, Martha. 2002. On the systematic aspect of idioms. Linguistic Inquiry 33: 665-672.
Merchant, Jason 2015. How much context is enough? Two cases of span-conditioned allomorphy. Linguistic Inquiry 46: 273-303.
Myler, Neil. 2016. Building and interpreting possessive sentences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Newell, Heather. 2023. Tamil pronominal alternations are phonology not allomorphy. In Shen, Zheng & Laszakovits, Sabine (eds.). The size of things II: Movement, features, and interpretation. (Open Generative Syntax 13). Berlin: Language Science Press.
Nunberg, Geoffrey, Ivan Sag, & Thomas Wasow. (1994). Idioms. Language 70: 491-538.
Paparounas, Lefteris. 2024. Visibility and Intervention in Allomorphy: Lessons from Modern Greek. Linguistic Inquiry 55: 537–577.
Richards, Norvin. 2001. An idiomatic argument for lexical decomposition. Linguistic Inquiry 32:183–192.
Scheer, Tobias 2016. Melody-free syntax and phonologically conditioned allomorphy. Morphology 26: 341-378.
Smith, Peter, Beata Moskal, Ting Xu, Jungmin Kang, and Jonathan David Bobaljik. 2019. Case and Number Suppletion in Pronouns. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 37: 1029-1101.
Thoms, Gary, David Adger, Caroline Heycock, E Jamieson, Jennifer Smith. 2025. Explaining syntactic microvariation using the Tolerance Principle: plugging the amn't gap. Journal of Linguistics 61: 369-396.
Wierzba, Marta., J.M.M Brown, J. & Gisbert Fanselow. 2023. Sources of variability in the syntactic flexibility of idioms. Glossa: 8(1): 1-41
Wood, Jim. 2012. Icelandic Morphosyntax and Argument Structure. PhD, NYU.
Wood, Jim. 2013. The unintentional causer in Icelandic. In Yelena Fainleib, Nicholas LaCara & Yangsook Park (eds.), Proceedings of the Forty-First Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society, vol. II, 273–286. Amherst, MA: GLSA Publications.
Wood, Jim. 2016. How roots do and don’t constrain the interpretation of Voice. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 96. 1–25.
Wood, Jim. 2023. Icelandic nominalizations and allosemy. Oxford: OUP.
Wood, Jim and Alec Marantz. 2017. The interpretation of external arguments. In Roberta D’Alessandro, Irene Franco and Ángel J. Gallego [eds.] The Verbal Domain, 255–278. Oxford University Press.
Yang, Charles. 2016. The price of linguistic productivity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.