The first ever Experiments in Linguistic Meaning conference took place virtually from 9/16-9/18. Hosted at the University of Pennsylvania, and co-organized by Florian Schwarz and Anna Papafragou, ELM is a ‘conference … dedicated to the experimental study of linguistic meaning broadly construed, with a focus on theoretical issues in semantics and pragmatics, their interplay with other components of the grammar, their relation to language processing and acquisition, as well as their connections to human cognition and computation.’ If you’d like to be kept in the loop about this conference and the growing community around it, please consider joining their mailing list.

The full schedule can be found here.

UMass students and alumni were well represented among the presenters, including:

Suzi Lima (Ph.D. 2014, currently University of Toronto) gave an invited keynote presentation entitled ‘Defining atoms: a view from Brazilian languages‘

Maribel Romero (Ph.D., 1998, current University of Konstanz) gave an invited keynote presentation entitled ‘OR NOT alternative questions, focus and discourse structure‘

and

Alexander Gobel, ‘The Common Ground is not enough: Why Focus-sensitivity matters for Presupposition triggers‘

Nadine Bade and Florian Schwarz, ‘New data on the nature of competition between indefinites and definites‘

Anissa Neal and Brian Dillon, ‘Definitely islands?‘

Carolyn Anderson, ‘Coming in, or going out? Measuring the effect of discourse factors on perspective prominence‘