Author Archives: Angelika Kratzer

The Syntax of Justice: Law, Language, Access and Exclusion

A conference at Northeastern University.

March 30 – 31, 2017.
240 Dockser Hall, Northeastern University School of Law.

Invited speakers include Lisa Green (UMass Amherst, 1993 UMass PhD), as well as Larry Solan (Brooklyn Law School, 1978 UMass PhD) and Janet Randall (Northeastern University, 1982 UMass PhD).

From the conference website: “Law is where we put into words what we consider to be appropriate conduct. At times, this wording may be difficult to understand — thus defeating its purpose. Similar problems arise when words or sentences are ambiguous, when a word has a specialized meaning or when words are added unnecessarily and contribute no meaning. Many words depend on context while others have connotations that may not be clear. And some words mean very different things in different dialects of English.

These problems invite us to examine issues that arise not only in legal language, but also in language in general. For example:

  • the tension between precise technical vocabulary and obfuscational jargon
  • how to write laws that everyone can understand
  • the challenge of developing plain language jury instructions that capture the law in terms understandable to all jurors
  • the ways that literal interpretation and plain text meaning are insufficient to capture the nuance of language familiar in ordinary conversation

This conference will focus on how language can lead to exclusion and injustice, and how to overcome these problems via research that recognizes and points to ways to rectify exclusion and expand access to justice.”

CSSP 2017: Call for papers

The 12th Syntax and Semantics Conference in Paris (CSSP 2017) will take place on November 23-25, 2017 at the École Nationale Supérieure (ENS), Paris. CSSP welcomes papers combining empirical inquiry and formal explicitness, and favours comparisons between different theoretical frameworks.

In light of the fact that work in semantics often addresses pragmatic issues and with the increasing prominence of both experimental and computational approaches CSSP now welcomes papers employing theoretical/experimental/computational methods in:

  • syntax,
  • semantics,
  • pragmatics
  • the syntax-semantics interface
  • the semantics-pragmatics interface
  • language acquisition: syntax-semantics-pragmatics

The thematic session will focus on the issue of:  Discourse particles

Submission: We invite submissions for 40 minute presentations (including 10 minutes for discussion). CSSP is changing its submission procedures. Submissions are expected to describe substantial, original, completed and unpublished work, hence submissions should be up to 5 pages plus an extra page for references (anonymous pdf). The submission procedure and templates for abstracts are available  here. Deadline: May 8.

Scientific Committee : see this page.

Tenure for Amy Rose Deal at UC Berkeley

amy-roseAmy Rose Deal (2010 UMass PhD) has just heard that she has been awarded tenure at UC Berkeley.

Amy Rose is a semanticist, syntactician, and fieldworker. The big questions that interest her “concern cross-linguistic variation: How much variation is there in syntax? How much is there in semantics? How can we tell syntactic and semantic variation apart?” She finds answers to those questions mostly by investigating Nez Perce, a Sahaptian language of the Columbia River Plateau.

Questioning Speech Acts. Call for Papers

In the last decade or so, there has been a renewed interest in speech acts
within formal semantics and pragmatics, spurred by work on topics like clause
typing, explicit performatives and discourse particles on the one hand, and
the development of new formal models for the study of pragmatics and discourse
on the other.

We invite submissions of abstracts for 30-minute oral presentations (plus
discussion) that address these and related questions from a theoretical,
empirical or formal perspective.

The workshop is will take place at the University of Konstanz, Germany on
September 14-16, 2017 and will feature talks by: Joe Buffington (Albany Law), Cleo Condoravdi (Stanford), Christine Gunlogson (Rochester), Magdalena Kaufmann (UConn), Will Starr (Cornell).

Abstracts should be no longer than 2 pages (Times 12 pt, 1 inch margins,
including all examples and figures), references may be included on a third
page. Submit abstracts by May 21 via the Easychair page:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=qsa17

Deadline for submission: May 21, 2017
Notification of acceptance: June 18, 2017
Workshop: September 14 – 16, 2017

In case of questions relating to the workshop, contact:
sven.lauer@uni-konstanz.de

Sinn und Bedeutung 22: Call for Papers

Sinn und Bedeutung 22 is hosted by the Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) Berlin and the Linguistics Department of the University of Potsdam. There is a pre-event workshop “Microvariation in Semantics” and a special session “Semantics and Natural Logic”.

Invited Speakers:

Amy Rose Deal (University of California, Berkeley. 2010 UMass PhD)
Danny Fox (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Louise McNally (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
Philippe Schlenker (Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris/New York University)

Important Dates:

Abstract submission deadline: March 5, 2017
Notification of acceptance: Early June, 2017
Microvariation Workshop: September 6, 2017
Sinn und Bedeutung: September 7-9, 2017 (main session), September 10, 2017 (special session)

New Journal: Semantic Fieldwork Methods

Semantic Fieldwork Methods is a new online peer-reviewed journal, dedicated to the discussion of innovative techniques and materials for use in semantic, pragmatic and syntactic fieldwork. We invite contributions which explain and illustrate how hypotheses about meaning and about the syntax-semantics interface can be tested in a fieldwork setting. The prototypical article for Semantic Fieldwork Methods outlines a research question, presents materials which can be used in the investigation of this research question, and shows the results obtained in at least one language using the proposed methodology. For example, contributors might provide a storyboard (a set of connected pictures designed to elicit specific linguistic phenomena; see www.totemfieldstoryboards.org, Burton and Matthewson 2015). In such a paper the author would explain how the storyboard is designed to elicit the relevant data, present a story elicited using the storyboard in some language, outline and illustrate the follow-up elicitation questions which need to be asked, and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed storyboard in obtaining useful data. Ideally, the elicitation materials presented in SFM papers will be replicable across a wide range of languages. We discourage the submission of questionnaires which rely solely on translation or which are otherwise language-dependent. We are currently inviting contributions for our first issue.

Please send anonymized papers to semantic.fieldwork@ubc.ca and provide author and affiliation information in the body of the email. Questions concerning submission can be addressed to the editors (Strang Burton, Patrick Littell and Lisa Matthewson) at the same email address.

2017 Linguistics Institute fellowship applications are open

lsa-summer-instituteGraduate and undergraduate students interested in attending the LSA’s 2017 Linguistic Institute can now begin applications (login as LSA member is required) for student fellowships. A large number of fellowships covering the full cost of tuition are available, as well as four named fellowships which cover additional expenses.

The 2017 Linguistic Institute, themed “Language Across Space and Time”, will be held from July 5 – August 1 and hosted by the University of Kentucky. Over the Institute’s four weeks, scores of courses will be offered on introductory and advanced topics across linguistics.

 

Altshuler on Events, States, and Times

altshulerDaniel Altshuler’s book on Events, States, and Times (An Essay on Narrative Discourse in English) has just come out. For this book, Daniel won the Grand Prize of the Emerging Scholar Monograph Competition. The book is Open Access, you can read it here. And here is what renowned semanticist Hans Kamp says about the book:

“This book is an important and innovative contribution to the literature on time, aspect and discourse structure. By carefully probing into the different uses of a single word (the English adverb `now’) and into the various theories that have been put forward to account for those uses, Altshuler succeeds in throwing new light on the intriguing interactions between temporal reference, event structure and rhetorical relations. The insights of Part I are put to excellent use in Part II, where they are applied to two notorious puzzles from the tense and aspect literature, cessation and double access. As Altshuler shows convincingly, only a penetrating analysis of the interaction between temporal, aspectual and rhetorical relations will lead to a solution of these puzzles.”

 

Syntax and Semantics Workshops: Preparation for Charnavel Colloquium

On Wednesday (November 30, 12:25 PM), there will be a joint meeting of the Semantics and Syntax Workshops. Rodica Ivan will prepare us for Isabelle Charnavel’s Colloquium on December 2. Rodica writes that Isabelle is not entirely sure what she’ll present yet, but it will be about perspectival clauses. You can find a folder with the papers Isabelle suggested (as well as a syllabus for one of her recent classes) here. Rutherford 1970 is background reading, the other papers are more directly related to her talk.