Author Archives: Angelika Kratzer

Final call for papers: Theoretical and Experimental Approaches to Presuppositions

Deadline: December 4, 2016. Conference date: March 3 – 5, 2017. Conference location: Genoa (Italy). Here is the link to the conference website.

genoaThe goal of this workshop is to provide an overview of the state of the art in Experimental Pragmatics on the theoretical and experimental approaches to presuppositions. The ideal contribution is one that advances presuppositions on the basis of experimental data, but also contributions on the experimental methodology for testing presuppositions and those making novel theoretical proposals are welcome. Florian Schwarz (University of Pennsylvania, 2009 UMass PhD) is one of the invited speakers. 

SALT 27: Final call for papers

Design: Alexander Williams

Design: Alexander Williams

From Alexander Williams: The deadline for SALT abstracts is close: the end of Sunday, December 4th. Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) is the premiere North American conference on semantics as a part of linguistic theory. The 27th SALT will take place on May 12–14, 2017, at The University of Maryland, College Park. Our invited speakers are Pranav Anand, Chris Barker, Sarah Murray and Maribel Romero (Universität Konstanz, 1998 UMass PhD). In addition on May 11 there will be a pre-SALT workshop, “Meaning and Distribution”, with invited speakers Angelika Kratzer, Beth Levin and Jeffrey Lidz, on the topic of observed correlations between syntactic and semantic classes. We invite critical discussion of traditional questions: how do such correlations help us understand language acquisition, variation or invariance across languages, or relations between linguistic and nonlinguistic cognition?

Call for Papers
We invite submission of abstracts for 30-minute oral presentations (with an additional 10 minutes for questions) or posters on any topic in natural language semantics with relevance to linguistic theory. The workshop on Meaning and Distribution has the same submission and reviewing process as the main session.

Submission Details
Abstracts are due at 11:59PM, Eastern Standard Time, on the night of Sunday December 4, 2016, and should be submitted via Easychair at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=salt27 .
Abstracts must be anonymous. The main text should be at most 2 pages (US Letter or A4) in length, including examples, with an optional 3rd page for references. The abstract should use a 12pt font and 1 inch margins (for US Letter) or 3 cm margins (for A4) on all four sides. The abstract must be submitted as a single PDF file. These limitations will be strictly enforced. In addition to the intellectual interest of the abstract, clarity and readability will also be taken into account in reviewing. SALT 27 will feature a poster session. Poster presentations will be published as regular papers in the proceedings. Poster presenters will be asked to give a short “lightning round” presentation prior to the poster session.

Policies
Authors may be involved in at most two abstracts and may be the sole author of at most one abstract. SALT does not accept papers that at the time of the conference have been published or have been accepted for publication. In addition, preference will be given to presentations that are not duplicated at other major conferences. If the work or a close variant of it is under submission to or accepted for publication or presentation in any other major venue (such as a national or international conference or a journal/book chapter), we request that the authors create a small section titled “Additional Submission” after the references at the end of the paper. This section should include the other venue(s) for which the work has been submitted, the status of those submissions, and an indication of any major aspects of the SALT abstract not submitted elsewhere. We require that authors update us by email if/when there is a relevant change in the status of other submissions.

Call for papers: Subjectivity in Language and Thought

The Departments of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Chicago will host a two-day workshop, May 19-20, 2017, that aims to bring together recent innovations and novel perspectives on the phenomenon of subjectivity in language and thought. Submission deadline: January 2, 2017. The workshop website with submission guidelines and more info about the workshop is here.
Expressions whose meaning have a distinctly subjective dimension – most notably predicates of personal taste — have received increased attention by linguists and philosophers in the last decade or so. In addition to the extensively debated phenomenon of “faultless disagreement,” the fact that across languages certain attitude verbs such as English ‘find’ require their complement to be subjective in a distinct way raises unique conceptual and empirical challenges to a comprehensive theory of natural language meaning. Several researchers have explored issues about subjective expressions beyond their significance for the relativism-vs-contextualism debate that is so prominent in linguistics and philosophy of language, including: the types of subjective meanings that natural languages encode, the subjective dimensions of modality, and the evidential dimension of subjective predicates and attitude verbs. The aim of this workshop is to continue this trend by bringing together innovative perspectives on subjective language and thought in an interdisciplinary setting.

Call for Papers: Compositionality at the Interfaces

Deadline for submission of abstracts: November 15 (very soon!). The workshop is held in connection with GLOW. The website for the Compositionality Workshop is here. Maribel Romero (1998 UMass PhD) is the (sole) invited speaker.

“Compositionality has always been a key methodological assumption in formal semantic theory. As a result, meaning is to be studied at the syntax-semantics interface. The nature of this field of enquiry is in flux, though. Not only is our understanding of syntax in continuous development, the 21st century saw pragmatic phenomena become part of the semantic agenda. The upshot is that compositionality is now at the center of the interplay between syntax, semantics and pragmatics. The focus of this GLOW workshop is how advances in syntax and pragma/semantics impact on our understanding of compositional interpretation.”

Internships for Undergraduates: AAAS Minority Science Writers Program

More info is here. Application window: October 16 to February 1.

From the AAAS announcement: “The AAAS Pitts Family Foundation Minority Science Writers Internship is for undergraduates who are interested in journalism as a career and who want to learn about science writing. In addition to improving their skills, the program seeks to make a dent in the demographics of the profession: Although science is a global activity, the journalists who cover it don’t reflect that diversity.

Funded by the Pitts Family Foundation, the internship takes place each summer at the Washington, D.C. headquarters of AAAS’s Science magazine, the largest interdisciplinary journal in the world. Interns spend ten weeks at Science under the guidance of award-winning reporters and editors practicing what science writers do for a living. They have a chance to meet leading scientists, attend conferences and hearings, and cover breaking news. Interns are expected to contribute to all facets of the news operation, including writing bylined articles for the print magazine and online news service, engaging in social media, and contributing to other news products.

Interns receive a weekly stipend as well as the cost of a round-trip ticket to and from Washington, D.C. The internship runs from early June to mid-August. This year’s application deadline is Feb. 1, 2017. To be eligible, applicants must be enrolled in an undergraduate academic program at the time they submit their application.”

Jyoti Iyer in Semantics Workshop

jotiJyoti Iyer will speak in Semantics Workshop this week (Wednesday, 12:25 PM). The title of her talk is: Tamil additive –um and negative polarity.

“I will address the distribution of Tamil wh-NPIs and the issues it raises for existing frameworks. These NPIs are formed from a wh-phrase (with an additive particle) and therefore part of a larger crosslinguistically well-attested pattern. The puzzles here are to do with pinning down the contribution of the additive particle.”

Call for papers: the Chicago Linguistics Society

Deadline for submission of abstracts: February 5. More info is here.

The Chicago Linguistic Society invites abstracts in any area of current research on the human language faculty, to include phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, historical linguistics, and sociolinguistics, as well as allied fields in the cognitive and social sciences. We particularly encourage submissions relevant to this year’s proposed special topics: Computational/Mathematical Linguistics, Cross-linguistic Quantification, East-Asian Linguistics, Intonation and Prosody, and Sign Language Linguistics.

Rising Researcher Award for Jack Duff

jack-duffSource and more info: College of Humanities and Fine Arts, UMass Amherst.

“A double major in Linguistics and Classics, Jack Duff ’18 is a recent recipient of the UMass Amherst Rising Researcher Award. He combines his two majors in his research, most recently conducting linguistic analysis of Horace’s poetry to find out how ancient Romans attributed text to different speakers without modern punctuation. He discovered that, “language always finds a way…”.”

“I got here interested in doing linguistics and started doing some classics stuff on the side because I wanted to continue studying Latin like I had in high school, and also pick up ancient Greek because I knew that it was taught here and that it was a good class to take. And then I realized that I really wanted to keep doing classics as much as I wanted to do linguistics, and so I found myself kind of putting a lot of energy into both majors and trying to find how they overlap.”

Ethan Poole on Moving and Shifting in Semantics Workshop

ethanEthan Poole will present his ongoing dissertation research in Semantics Workshop this week (Wednesday, October 2, 12:25 PM). Here is a short description of his presentation:

Moving and shifting.

This talk focuses on the interaction between nominal type shifting and movement. The empirical domain of inquiry is A’-extraction asymmetries in English, like in (1) and (2) (first observed in Postal 1994).
(1a) What is there on the table?
(1b) *A book, there is on the table.
(2a) What color did Mary paint the house?
(2b) *Magenta, Mary painted the house.
I argue that the environments exhibiting this asymmetry are ones in which the DP has a property-type denotation derived via nominal type shifting (Partee 1987). I propose that, in English, nominal type shifters are in complementary distribution with the anaphoric definite determiner necessary for Trace Conversion. Thus, positions like (1) and (2) are incompatible with movement that cannot reconstruct. This analysis makes predictions about the behavior of definite descriptions in these environments. I show preliminary evidence that these predictions bear out.