From BILLY1 at MDX.AC.UK Tue Jul 9 16:04:46 1996 From: BILLY1 at MDX.AC.UK (billy clark) Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 16:04:46 GMT Subject: CONFS: Linguistics Association of Great Britain Message-ID: LINGUISTICS ASSOCIATION OF GREAT BRITAIN Autumn Meeting 1996: University of Wales Institute, Cardiff Second Circular The 1996 Autumn Meeting will be held from Saturday 7 to Monday 9 September at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff on the Cyncoed Campus, where the Association will be the guests of the Faculty of Community and Health Sciences. The Local Organisers are Janig Stephens (jstephens at uwic.ac.uk) and Helen Pandeli (hpandeli at uwic.ac.uk). Enquiries about the meeting should be sent to: Janig Stephens/Helen Pandeli, LAGB Autumn Meeting, School of Environmental and Human Sciences, UWIC, Llandaff, Western Avenue, Cardiff CF5 2YB. Accommodation: will be at the Cyncoed campus, Cyncoed Road, Cardiff. All the rooms have en suite facilities: wash basin, shower and toilet. There are no double rooms. The talks will take place on the campus, in a building very close to the accommodation building. Rooms will be allocated strictly on a "first-come first-served" basis. Registration: will begin at 10am on Saturday the 7th of September in the foyer of the main building, near the main entrance. Late arrivals can collect their keys from the porters lodge either from the porter or from the Security Officer after 10pm. Bar: Delegates are welcome to use the campus bar adjacent to the conference building. Food: vegetarian food will be available automatically. Please indicate any other dietary requirements on the booking form below. Creche: Creche facilities are available, at a cost of 40.00 sterling per child per day. Please indicate on the booking form if you wish to book a place. Travel: The Cyncoed campus is 3 miles from Cardiff Central Railway Station. The Central Bus Station is directly opposite. The number 52 bus runs from the station to the Cyncoed campus. Taxis are available at the station; the fare to the campus is approximately 4.00 sterling. For delegates travelling by air to Cardiff Rhoose Airport, a bus service (X91) to the Central Bus Station is available outside the terminal building. On Saturday, buses leave the airport at: 06.48, 09.40, 10.40, 11.40, 12.40, 13.40, 14.45, 15.45, 16.45, 16.55 and 18.40. The journey takes about 35 minutes. Delegates travelling by road should leave the M4 at junction 29 (signpost to Cardiff East) and follow the A48 to the Llanedeyrn junction (signpost to Cardiff East and Docks). Take the 3rd exit (Llanedeyrn) at the roundabout and at the immediately next roundabout take the Llanedeyrn Road which joins Cyncoed Road. Turn right at the traffic lights. The entrance to the Cyncoed campus is about 1 mile up the road on the right. Parking: Free parking is available on campus in the immediate vicinity of the accommodation. Events: The Henry Sweet Lecture 1996 on the Saturday evening will be delivered by Professor Janet Dean Fodor (CUNY) and is entitled Setting parameters: fewer but better triggers. A Special Guest Lecture on Sunday evening will be given by Professor Robert D. Van Valin Jr. (SUNY at Buffalo) entitled The role of pragmatics in the linking between syntax and semantics. There will be a Workshop on Learnability and language acquisition for linguists, organised by Stefano Bertolo (MIT) and chaired by Robert Borsley (Bangor). The course is tutorial in nature and presupposes no previous knowledge of these topics. In the first part of the Workshop, Stefano Bertolo will introduce fundamental concepts and results from formal learning theory (criteria of successful learning, classes of hypotheses, modes of presentation and properties of learning functions) and assess the psychological plausibility of some of the available alternatives. In the second part of the Workshop, Martin Atkinson, Robin Clark, Jonathan Kaye and Ian Roberts will discuss some of the consequences of such formal results with respect to Syntax, Complexity Theory, Phonology and Diachronic Syntax respectively. Martin Atkinson will take a selection of attempts to apply the Principle and Parameters framework to acquisition problems, seeking to identify their strength and weaknesses. He will show how, although the gap between conceptual framework and empirical investigation is significant, the nature of the gap can itself be revealing. Robin Clark will cover the relationship between complexity theory and learning theory. Variable properties of language are such that they can be learned from finite exposure to an input text. This implies that variation is bounded by the information available in a finite text. His tutorial will introduce principles from information theory that can be used to study these bounds. Jonathan Kaye will elucidate why one must carefully distinguish the acquisition of phonological parameters, to wit, structural parameters (branching rhymes, nuclei or onsets), licensing constraints (U must be head, nothing can license I, etc.), empty category parameters (license to govern, etc.) from the acquisition of group recognition cues and show how much of what passes for "phonetics" is unrelated to linguistic phenomena but rather forms part of the human group recognition system which shares the vocal channel with the linguistic system. Ian Roberts will discuss one of the fundamental ideas in historical linguistics, the idea that grammars may be restructured by children acquiring them and show how, in terms of principles and parameters theory, this can be seen as convergence on value j of a parameter P where the adult language has P set to i. Elaborating on what Clark & Roberts (1993) called the logical problem of language change he will show how, in principle, a sufficiently close study of the circumstances of language change ought to shed light on what causes on convergence on given parameter values. There will be a Language Tutorial on Mohawk, given by Professor Marianne Mithun (University of California, Santa Barbara). Mohawk is an Iroquoian language spoken in six communities in northeastern North America. Unlike many North American languages, it is still spoken skilfully by several thousand adults. The language has always been enjoyed, valued, and cultivated by its speakers, and now, due to great efforts within the communities, children are again beginning to learn it as a mother tongue. The tutorial will present an overview of the structure of the language, from phonology through morphology, syntax, and discourse. Grammatical categories and patterns will be described and their use examined in samples of spontaneous connected speech. Among the features of special interest are the relation between lexical and syntactic categories, agent-patient case patterning, extensive noun incorporation, and fully pragmatically determined word order. The relatively elaborate morphological structure has important implications for the nature of the syntax. In addition, it offers speakers important options in the way information is packaged in speech, options unavailable to speakers of many of the more familiar languages of Europe and Asia. There will be a Wine Party on the Saturday evening, following Professor Fodor s lecture, sponsored by the Faculty of Community Health Sciences. Bookings: should be sent to the Local Organisers, address above, to arrive by Friday 9th August. Cheques should be made payable to "LAGB Cardiff 1996". Guests: Members may invite any number of guests to meetings of the association, upon payment of a 5.oo sterling guest invitation fee. Members wishing to invite guests should photocopy the enclosed booking form. Abstracts: are available to members who are unable to attend the meeting. Please order using the booking form below. Business Meeting: This is to be held on the afternoon of Sunday 8 September. Items for the agenda should be sent to the Honorary Secretary. Nominations for speakers: Nominations are requested for future guest speakers; all suggestions should be sent to the Honorary Secretary. Changes of address: Members are reminded to notify the Membership Secretary (address below) of changes of address. An institutional address is preferred; bulk mailing saves postage. Committee members: President: Professor Greville Corbett, Linguistic and International Studies, University of Surrey, GUILDFORD, Surrey, GU2 5XH. e-mail: g.corbett at surrey.ac.uk Honorary Secretary: Dr. David Adger, Dept. of Language and Linguistic Science, University of York, Heslington, York. YO1 5DD. e-mail: da4 at tower.york.ac.uk. Membership Secretary: Dr. Kersti Borjars, Department of Linguistics, University of Manchester, MANCHESTER M13 9PL. e-mail: k.e.borjars at manchester.ac.uk Meetings Secretary: Dr. Billy Clark, Communication Studies, Middlesex University, Trent Park, Bramley Road, LONDON N14 4XS. e-mail: billy1 at mdx.ac.uk Treasurer: Dr. Paul Rowlett, Dept. of Modern Languages, University of Salford, Salford M5 4WT. e-mail: p.a.rowlett at mod-lang.salford.ac.uk Assistant Secretary: Dr. April McMahon, Dept. of Linguistics, University of Cambridge, Sidgwick Avenue, CAMBRIDGE CB3 9DQ. e-mail: AMM11 at hermes.cam.ac.uk BLN Editor: Dr. Siew-Yue Killingley, Grevatt and Grevatt, 9 Rectory Drive, NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE NE13 1XT. British Linguistic Newsletter: Members are reminded that they can subscribe to BLN (ISBN0964-6574) by contacting the Editor, Dr. S-Y. Killingley. Please do not send subscriptions for BLN to the LAGB Treasurer. Internet home page: The LAGB internet home page is now active at the following address: http://clwww.essex.ac.uk/LAGB. Electronic network: Please join the LAGB electronic network which is used for disseminating LAGB information and for consulting members quickly. It can be subscribed to by sending the message "add lagb" to: listserv at postman.essex.ac.uk. Future Meetings: 7-9 April 1997 University of Edinburgh. 4-6 September 1997 University of Hertfordshire. 14-16 April 1998 University of Lancaster. 10-12 September 1998 (dates provisional) University of Luton. Spring 1999 (provisional) University of Manchester. Autumn 1999 (provisional) University of York. Spring 2000 (provisional) University College London. The Meetings Secretary would very much like to receive offers of future venues, particularly from institutions which the LAGB has not previously visited or from places with newly established linguistics programmes. Other dates for your diary: 20-22 September 1996: Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Conference: Thought and Language. For details and booking form, send full postal address to: J.M.Preston at reading.ac.uk 4-6 April 1997: GALA '97. Further information, including abstracts deadline, on: http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/gala/ (N.B. immediately preceding the LAGB meeting in Edinburgh 7-9 April) PROGRAMME: Saturday 7 September 1996 1.00 LUNCH 2.00 Workshop: Learnability and language acquisition for linguists Organiser: Stefano Bertolo (MIT). Chair: Robert Borsley (Bangor). 4.00 TEA 4.30 Workshop continues 6.30 DINNER 7.45 Henry Sweet Lecture: Professor Janet Dean Fodor (City University of New York) Setting parameters: fewer but better triggers Sunday 8 September 1996 Session A 9.00 John Charles Smith (Manchester) "Skeuomorphy and Language Change" 9.40 Susan Pintzuk (York) "Syntactic Change via Grammatical Competition: Evidence from Old English" 10.20 Oliver Currie (Cambridge) "The Development of Verb-Initial Order in Welsh and the Discreteness of Syntactic Change" Session B 9.00 Steve Nicolle (York) "A Relevance Theoretic Account of will and be going to: how to maintain monosemy in the face of semantic retention" 9.40 Thorstein Fretheim (Trondheim) "The Pragmatics of Norwegian Sentence Fragments Modified by the Particle s^2" 10.20 Jennifer Dailey-O'Cain (Michigan) "The Sociolinguistic Distribution of and Subjective Attitudes toward the Discourse Marker 'like' in the Midwestern United States" Session C 9.00 Dalina Kallulli (Durham) "Noun Phrases, Specificity and Syntactic Structure" 9.40 Yuji Nishiyama (Keio) "Attributive and Non-referential NPs" 10.20 Dorothee Beermann (Tilburg) "Morphological Marking and Syntactic Scope Resolution" 11.00 COFFEE 11.30 Language Tutorial: Mohawk Professor Marianne Mithun (University of California, Santa Barbara) 1.00 LUNCH Session A 2.00 Hassan A Durgauhee (Edinburgh) "Towards an Explicit Ontology of Phonetic Representation" 2.40 Kuniya Nasukawa (Tohoku Gakuin) "Mora Nasal and Syllable Structure in Japanese" 3.20 Richard Breheny (UCL) "Post-Nuclear Predictability" Session B 2.00 Eun-Ju Noh (UCL) "A Relevance-Theoretic Account of Metarepresentative Uses in Conditionals" 2.40 Anna Papafragou (UCL) "Indirect Requests: A Relevance-Theoretic Reappraisal" 3.20 Xose Rosales Sequeiros (Buckingham) "Communicated and Non-communicated Relational Propositions" Session C 2.00 Richard Hudson (UCL) "Partial-VP Fronting: taking the PS out of HPSG?" 2.40 Ian Roberts and Anna Roussou (Bangor) "Speculations on V2" 3.20 M Siobhan Cottell (Bangor) "VP-clefting and the Structure of VP" 4.00 TEA 4.30 LAGB Business Meeting 5.30 Language Tutorial: Mohawk Professor Marianne Mithun (University of California, Santa Barbara) 6.30 DINNER 7.45 Special Guest Lecture: Professor Robert D. Van Valin Jr. (SUNY at Buffalo) The role of pragmatics in the linking between syntax and semantics Monday 9 September 1996 Session A 9.00 Nigel Vincent (Manchester) "The Theoretical Implications of Double Case Marking" 9.40 Dunstan Brown (Surrey) "Facts that Influence the Shape of Inheritance Hierarchies: A Bulgarian Example" 10.20 Andrew Spencer (Essex) "Pri-prefixation in Russian" Session B 9.00 Tomoko Matsui (Birkbeck) "Bridging and Coherence" 9.40 Angelos Kokolakis (UCL) "Default Accent and Relevance" 10.20 Sheila Glasbey (Edinburgh) "Achievements v. Accomplishments: Do we need the distinction?" Session C 9.00 Alan R King (Zarautz) "Root Modals in European Languages: A Preliminary Typology" 9.40 Jeanne Cornillon (SOAS) "Ne is an Expletive" 10.20 Maggie Tallerman (Durham) "Welsh Soft Mutation Doesn't Target Complements!" 11.00 COFFEE 11.30 Language Tutorial: Mohawk Professor Marianne Mithun (University of California, Santa Barbara) 1.00 LUNCH Session A 2.00 Margaret Deuchar and Suzanne Quay (Bangor and Tokyo) "How Early is Language Choice Possible?" 2.40 Pedro Fuentes (Salford) "Do the Features of the "Pro-Drop Parameter" form a Cluster?" Session B 2.00 Anne Cooreman and Anthony Sandford (Glasgow) "Temporal and Causal Subordination in Discourse" 2.40 Heloisa Salles (Bangor) "Argument Licensing in Ditransitive Constructions: A Minimalist Approach" Session C 2.00 Anne Zribi-Hertz (Paris 8) "Postnominal Possessives in English and French" 2.40 Mike Davenport and S. J. Hannahs (Durham) "Evidence, Counterevidence and Optimality Theory" 3.20 TEA AND CLOSE BOOKING FORM: Please return this form, with your remittance, by 9 August, to: Janig Stephens/Helen Pandeli, LAGB Autumn Meeting, School of Environmental and Human Sciences, UWIC, Llandaff, Western Avenue, Cardiff CF5 2YB. Please make cheques payable to "LAGB Cardiff 1996". ______________________________________________________________________________ NAME......................................INSTITUTION................................................................................. ADDRESS FOR THIS MAILING..................................................................................................... ............................................................................................................................................................ EMAIL ADDRESS............................................................................................................................ I enclose remittance as indicated: EITHER 1. Complete conference package (a) or (b): a) including Saturday lunch preceding workshop (i) if sent to arrive before 9 August 90-36 sterling (ii) if sent to arrive after 9 August 100-40 sterling (b) excluding Saturday lunch (i) if sent to arrive before 9 August 84-06 sterling (ii) if sent to arrive after 9 August 93-40 sterling (c) Surcharge for non-members, 5-00 sterling TOTAL: OR 2. Selected items (a) conference fee (OBLIGATORY) to cover cost of abstracts, tea and coffee, room bookings, speakers' expenses etc. 15-00 sterling (b) Saturday lunch 7-00 sterling (c) Saturday dinner 8-80 sterling (d) Overnight accommodation Saturday/Sunday 18-30 sterling (e) Breakfast Sunday 5-10 sterling (f) Sunday lunch 7-00 sterling (g) Sunday dinner 8-80 sterling (h) Overnight accommodation Sunday/Monday 18-30 sterling (i) Breakfast Monday 5-10 sterling (j) Monday lunch 7-00 sterling SUB-TOTAL: Deduct 10% if sent to arrive before 16 August: (k) Surcharge for non-members, 5-00 sterling TOTAL: OR 3. Abstracts only, for those not attending. 4-00 sterling UK....................................... 5-00 sterling overseas................................. CRECHE: Please indicate requirements here and add o40.00 per child per day to your payment: a) dates required................................ b) child's age(s)..................................................................... OTHER SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS(e.g. DIET, ACCOMMODATION)................................ ................................................................................................................................................ From tpc1 at RA.MSSTATE.EDU Thu Jul 11 07:15:41 1996 From: tpc1 at RA.MSSTATE.EDU (Thomas Price Caldwell, Jr.) Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 00:15:41 -0700 Subject: modal survey summary Message-ID: Allen: Can I have a copy of your modal survey summary? Thanks, Price From bfox at SPOT.COLORADO.EDU Thu Jul 18 18:28:29 1996 From: bfox at SPOT.COLORADO.EDU (Fox Barbara) Date: Thu, 18 Jul 1996 12:28:29 -0600 Subject: CSDL III: Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language (fwd) Message-ID: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 13:26:34 -0600 (MDT) From: Dan Jurafsky To: cogling at ucsd.ucsd.edu Subject: CSDL III: Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language ************ CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURE, DISCOURSE and LANGUAGE III *************** ***** PRELIMINARY ANNOUNCEMENT ***** CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURE, DISCOURSE and LANGUAGE III: COGNITION AND FUNCTION IN LANGUAGE May 23-25, 1997 University of Colorado at Boulder Department of Linguistics Institute of Cognitive Science The third conference on Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language (CSDL III) will be held from May 23-25, 1997 on the BOULDER campus of the UNIVERSITY of COLORADO. This is a preliminary announcement so you can reserve the date; look for the call for papers later in the summer. We will invite papers which provide cognitive or functional analysis of linguistic phenomena, including discourse, conceptual structure, language function, metaphor, lexical semantics, pragmatics, meaning change and grammaticalization, and language processing. Organizing Committee: Laura Michaelis, Barbara Fox, Dan Jurafsky (michaeli at spot.colorado.edu, bfox at spot.colorado.edu, jurafsky at colorado.edu) From susan at UTAFLL.UTA.EDU Wed Jul 31 04:29:55 1996 From: susan at UTAFLL.UTA.EDU (Susan Herring) Date: Tue, 30 Jul 1996 23:29:55 CDT Subject: call for manuscripts: Computer-mediated conversation analysis Message-ID: ============================================================== Call for Manuscripts: COMPUTER-MEDIATED CONVERSATION High-quality manuscripts are solicited for an edited collection on the topic of COMPUTER-MEDIATED CONVERSATION, to be published by a major publisher. This will be the first book devoted entirely to linguistic and conversation analytic approaches to computer-mediated communication. Contents: Contributions may analyze any genre of verbal exchange that takes place via computer networks, including private e-mail, Listserv discussion groups, bulletin board systems, computer conferencing systems, chat, MUDs and MOOs, and multi-media systems. Contributions should report empirical, data-driven research carried out using conversation analysis or other discourse analysis methods. Possible areas of focus include topic development, floor management, turn taking, speech acts and act sequences, use of discourse markers, politeness strategies, framing, etc. In addition, all contributions should address in some way the question: to what extent are the observed properties of the discourse conditioned by the computer medium, and to what extent do they reflect social or other factors that may also be present in face-to-face communication? Submission information: Manuscripts should be 15-25 single-spaced pages in length, including references and appendices, and should follow the formatting style of Oxford University Press's Sociolinguistics series (for example, Deborah Tannen's _Framing in Discourse_, published in 1993). Submissions should be in the form of a hard copy plus a 3 1/2" Macintosh-readable diskette containing the file saved in its original format, as well as in MS Word for Macintosh (version 4 or 5). The hard copy and the diskette should be mailed to the volume editor, Susan Herring, at the following address: Susan Herring Program in Linguistics University of Texas Arlington, TX 76019 USA Deadlines: Oxford University Press has expressed interest in the project, and is requesting a preliminary version of the book manuscript for purposes of evaluation. In the interest of assembling a preliminary manuscript so as to secure a publisher as early as possible, authors are requested to submit their manuscripts to the volume editor by September 15, 1996. Interested potential authors who are undertaking relevant research, but who do not yet have a written mansucript, have the option of first submitting a 500-word abstract describing the problem, the data, the methods of analysis used, and the findings of their proposed article. On the basis of an evaluation of the abstracts, authors may be invited to submit a complete manuscript for inclusion in the volume. In such cases, the successful abstracts will be included in the preliminary manuscript that is sent to the publishers, and those authors will have until November 1, 1996 to submit a complete version of their chapter to the volume editor. Abstracts should be e-mailed to the editor as soon as possible, but in any event no later than September 15. Early submissions of both manuscripts and abstracts are welcomed. About the editor: Susan Herring is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the Unviersity of Texas at Arlington who has published numerous articles on computer-mediated communication since she first began presenting her research in this area in 1992. She is also the editor of an interdisciplinary collection entitled _Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social and Cross-Cultural Perspectives_ (John Benjamins, 1996) and guest editor of a forthcoming special issue of the _Electronic Journal of Communication_ on the topic of "Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis". For further information: Inquiries regarding this project may be e-mailed to the editor at susan at utafll.uta.edu. =========================================================== From BILLY1 at MDX.AC.UK Tue Jul 9 16:04:46 1996 From: BILLY1 at MDX.AC.UK (billy clark) Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 16:04:46 GMT Subject: CONFS: Linguistics Association of Great Britain Message-ID: LINGUISTICS ASSOCIATION OF GREAT BRITAIN Autumn Meeting 1996: University of Wales Institute, Cardiff Second Circular The 1996 Autumn Meeting will be held from Saturday 7 to Monday 9 September at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff on the Cyncoed Campus, where the Association will be the guests of the Faculty of Community and Health Sciences. The Local Organisers are Janig Stephens (jstephens at uwic.ac.uk) and Helen Pandeli (hpandeli at uwic.ac.uk). Enquiries about the meeting should be sent to: Janig Stephens/Helen Pandeli, LAGB Autumn Meeting, School of Environmental and Human Sciences, UWIC, Llandaff, Western Avenue, Cardiff CF5 2YB. Accommodation: will be at the Cyncoed campus, Cyncoed Road, Cardiff. All the rooms have en suite facilities: wash basin, shower and toilet. There are no double rooms. The talks will take place on the campus, in a building very close to the accommodation building. Rooms will be allocated strictly on a "first-come first-served" basis. Registration: will begin at 10am on Saturday the 7th of September in the foyer of the main building, near the main entrance. Late arrivals can collect their keys from the porters lodge either from the porter or from the Security Officer after 10pm. Bar: Delegates are welcome to use the campus bar adjacent to the conference building. Food: vegetarian food will be available automatically. Please indicate any other dietary requirements on the booking form below. Creche: Creche facilities are available, at a cost of 40.00 sterling per child per day. Please indicate on the booking form if you wish to book a place. Travel: The Cyncoed campus is 3 miles from Cardiff Central Railway Station. The Central Bus Station is directly opposite. The number 52 bus runs from the station to the Cyncoed campus. Taxis are available at the station; the fare to the campus is approximately 4.00 sterling. For delegates travelling by air to Cardiff Rhoose Airport, a bus service (X91) to the Central Bus Station is available outside the terminal building. On Saturday, buses leave the airport at: 06.48, 09.40, 10.40, 11.40, 12.40, 13.40, 14.45, 15.45, 16.45, 16.55 and 18.40. The journey takes about 35 minutes. Delegates travelling by road should leave the M4 at junction 29 (signpost to Cardiff East) and follow the A48 to the Llanedeyrn junction (signpost to Cardiff East and Docks). Take the 3rd exit (Llanedeyrn) at the roundabout and at the immediately next roundabout take the Llanedeyrn Road which joins Cyncoed Road. Turn right at the traffic lights. The entrance to the Cyncoed campus is about 1 mile up the road on the right. Parking: Free parking is available on campus in the immediate vicinity of the accommodation. Events: The Henry Sweet Lecture 1996 on the Saturday evening will be delivered by Professor Janet Dean Fodor (CUNY) and is entitled Setting parameters: fewer but better triggers. A Special Guest Lecture on Sunday evening will be given by Professor Robert D. Van Valin Jr. (SUNY at Buffalo) entitled The role of pragmatics in the linking between syntax and semantics. There will be a Workshop on Learnability and language acquisition for linguists, organised by Stefano Bertolo (MIT) and chaired by Robert Borsley (Bangor). The course is tutorial in nature and presupposes no previous knowledge of these topics. In the first part of the Workshop, Stefano Bertolo will introduce fundamental concepts and results from formal learning theory (criteria of successful learning, classes of hypotheses, modes of presentation and properties of learning functions) and assess the psychological plausibility of some of the available alternatives. In the second part of the Workshop, Martin Atkinson, Robin Clark, Jonathan Kaye and Ian Roberts will discuss some of the consequences of such formal results with respect to Syntax, Complexity Theory, Phonology and Diachronic Syntax respectively. Martin Atkinson will take a selection of attempts to apply the Principle and Parameters framework to acquisition problems, seeking to identify their strength and weaknesses. He will show how, although the gap between conceptual framework and empirical investigation is significant, the nature of the gap can itself be revealing. Robin Clark will cover the relationship between complexity theory and learning theory. Variable properties of language are such that they can be learned from finite exposure to an input text. This implies that variation is bounded by the information available in a finite text. His tutorial will introduce principles from information theory that can be used to study these bounds. Jonathan Kaye will elucidate why one must carefully distinguish the acquisition of phonological parameters, to wit, structural parameters (branching rhymes, nuclei or onsets), licensing constraints (U must be head, nothing can license I, etc.), empty category parameters (license to govern, etc.) from the acquisition of group recognition cues and show how much of what passes for "phonetics" is unrelated to linguistic phenomena but rather forms part of the human group recognition system which shares the vocal channel with the linguistic system. Ian Roberts will discuss one of the fundamental ideas in historical linguistics, the idea that grammars may be restructured by children acquiring them and show how, in terms of principles and parameters theory, this can be seen as convergence on value j of a parameter P where the adult language has P set to i. Elaborating on what Clark & Roberts (1993) called the logical problem of language change he will show how, in principle, a sufficiently close study of the circumstances of language change ought to shed light on what causes on convergence on given parameter values. There will be a Language Tutorial on Mohawk, given by Professor Marianne Mithun (University of California, Santa Barbara). Mohawk is an Iroquoian language spoken in six communities in northeastern North America. Unlike many North American languages, it is still spoken skilfully by several thousand adults. The language has always been enjoyed, valued, and cultivated by its speakers, and now, due to great efforts within the communities, children are again beginning to learn it as a mother tongue. The tutorial will present an overview of the structure of the language, from phonology through morphology, syntax, and discourse. Grammatical categories and patterns will be described and their use examined in samples of spontaneous connected speech. Among the features of special interest are the relation between lexical and syntactic categories, agent-patient case patterning, extensive noun incorporation, and fully pragmatically determined word order. The relatively elaborate morphological structure has important implications for the nature of the syntax. In addition, it offers speakers important options in the way information is packaged in speech, options unavailable to speakers of many of the more familiar languages of Europe and Asia. There will be a Wine Party on the Saturday evening, following Professor Fodor s lecture, sponsored by the Faculty of Community Health Sciences. Bookings: should be sent to the Local Organisers, address above, to arrive by Friday 9th August. Cheques should be made payable to "LAGB Cardiff 1996". Guests: Members may invite any number of guests to meetings of the association, upon payment of a 5.oo sterling guest invitation fee. Members wishing to invite guests should photocopy the enclosed booking form. Abstracts: are available to members who are unable to attend the meeting. Please order using the booking form below. Business Meeting: This is to be held on the afternoon of Sunday 8 September. Items for the agenda should be sent to the Honorary Secretary. Nominations for speakers: Nominations are requested for future guest speakers; all suggestions should be sent to the Honorary Secretary. Changes of address: Members are reminded to notify the Membership Secretary (address below) of changes of address. An institutional address is preferred; bulk mailing saves postage. Committee members: President: Professor Greville Corbett, Linguistic and International Studies, University of Surrey, GUILDFORD, Surrey, GU2 5XH. e-mail: g.corbett at surrey.ac.uk Honorary Secretary: Dr. David Adger, Dept. of Language and Linguistic Science, University of York, Heslington, York. YO1 5DD. e-mail: da4 at tower.york.ac.uk. Membership Secretary: Dr. Kersti Borjars, Department of Linguistics, University of Manchester, MANCHESTER M13 9PL. e-mail: k.e.borjars at manchester.ac.uk Meetings Secretary: Dr. Billy Clark, Communication Studies, Middlesex University, Trent Park, Bramley Road, LONDON N14 4XS. e-mail: billy1 at mdx.ac.uk Treasurer: Dr. Paul Rowlett, Dept. of Modern Languages, University of Salford, Salford M5 4WT. e-mail: p.a.rowlett at mod-lang.salford.ac.uk Assistant Secretary: Dr. April McMahon, Dept. of Linguistics, University of Cambridge, Sidgwick Avenue, CAMBRIDGE CB3 9DQ. e-mail: AMM11 at hermes.cam.ac.uk BLN Editor: Dr. Siew-Yue Killingley, Grevatt and Grevatt, 9 Rectory Drive, NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE NE13 1XT. British Linguistic Newsletter: Members are reminded that they can subscribe to BLN (ISBN0964-6574) by contacting the Editor, Dr. S-Y. Killingley. Please do not send subscriptions for BLN to the LAGB Treasurer. Internet home page: The LAGB internet home page is now active at the following address: http://clwww.essex.ac.uk/LAGB. Electronic network: Please join the LAGB electronic network which is used for disseminating LAGB information and for consulting members quickly. It can be subscribed to by sending the message "add lagb" to: listserv at postman.essex.ac.uk. Future Meetings: 7-9 April 1997 University of Edinburgh. 4-6 September 1997 University of Hertfordshire. 14-16 April 1998 University of Lancaster. 10-12 September 1998 (dates provisional) University of Luton. Spring 1999 (provisional) University of Manchester. Autumn 1999 (provisional) University of York. Spring 2000 (provisional) University College London. The Meetings Secretary would very much like to receive offers of future venues, particularly from institutions which the LAGB has not previously visited or from places with newly established linguistics programmes. Other dates for your diary: 20-22 September 1996: Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Conference: Thought and Language. For details and booking form, send full postal address to: J.M.Preston at reading.ac.uk 4-6 April 1997: GALA '97. Further information, including abstracts deadline, on: http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/gala/ (N.B. immediately preceding the LAGB meeting in Edinburgh 7-9 April) PROGRAMME: Saturday 7 September 1996 1.00 LUNCH 2.00 Workshop: Learnability and language acquisition for linguists Organiser: Stefano Bertolo (MIT). Chair: Robert Borsley (Bangor). 4.00 TEA 4.30 Workshop continues 6.30 DINNER 7.45 Henry Sweet Lecture: Professor Janet Dean Fodor (City University of New York) Setting parameters: fewer but better triggers Sunday 8 September 1996 Session A 9.00 John Charles Smith (Manchester) "Skeuomorphy and Language Change" 9.40 Susan Pintzuk (York) "Syntactic Change via Grammatical Competition: Evidence from Old English" 10.20 Oliver Currie (Cambridge) "The Development of Verb-Initial Order in Welsh and the Discreteness of Syntactic Change" Session B 9.00 Steve Nicolle (York) "A Relevance Theoretic Account of will and be going to: how to maintain monosemy in the face of semantic retention" 9.40 Thorstein Fretheim (Trondheim) "The Pragmatics of Norwegian Sentence Fragments Modified by the Particle s^2" 10.20 Jennifer Dailey-O'Cain (Michigan) "The Sociolinguistic Distribution of and Subjective Attitudes toward the Discourse Marker 'like' in the Midwestern United States" Session C 9.00 Dalina Kallulli (Durham) "Noun Phrases, Specificity and Syntactic Structure" 9.40 Yuji Nishiyama (Keio) "Attributive and Non-referential NPs" 10.20 Dorothee Beermann (Tilburg) "Morphological Marking and Syntactic Scope Resolution" 11.00 COFFEE 11.30 Language Tutorial: Mohawk Professor Marianne Mithun (University of California, Santa Barbara) 1.00 LUNCH Session A 2.00 Hassan A Durgauhee (Edinburgh) "Towards an Explicit Ontology of Phonetic Representation" 2.40 Kuniya Nasukawa (Tohoku Gakuin) "Mora Nasal and Syllable Structure in Japanese" 3.20 Richard Breheny (UCL) "Post-Nuclear Predictability" Session B 2.00 Eun-Ju Noh (UCL) "A Relevance-Theoretic Account of Metarepresentative Uses in Conditionals" 2.40 Anna Papafragou (UCL) "Indirect Requests: A Relevance-Theoretic Reappraisal" 3.20 Xose Rosales Sequeiros (Buckingham) "Communicated and Non-communicated Relational Propositions" Session C 2.00 Richard Hudson (UCL) "Partial-VP Fronting: taking the PS out of HPSG?" 2.40 Ian Roberts and Anna Roussou (Bangor) "Speculations on V2" 3.20 M Siobhan Cottell (Bangor) "VP-clefting and the Structure of VP" 4.00 TEA 4.30 LAGB Business Meeting 5.30 Language Tutorial: Mohawk Professor Marianne Mithun (University of California, Santa Barbara) 6.30 DINNER 7.45 Special Guest Lecture: Professor Robert D. Van Valin Jr. (SUNY at Buffalo) The role of pragmatics in the linking between syntax and semantics Monday 9 September 1996 Session A 9.00 Nigel Vincent (Manchester) "The Theoretical Implications of Double Case Marking" 9.40 Dunstan Brown (Surrey) "Facts that Influence the Shape of Inheritance Hierarchies: A Bulgarian Example" 10.20 Andrew Spencer (Essex) "Pri-prefixation in Russian" Session B 9.00 Tomoko Matsui (Birkbeck) "Bridging and Coherence" 9.40 Angelos Kokolakis (UCL) "Default Accent and Relevance" 10.20 Sheila Glasbey (Edinburgh) "Achievements v. Accomplishments: Do we need the distinction?" Session C 9.00 Alan R King (Zarautz) "Root Modals in European Languages: A Preliminary Typology" 9.40 Jeanne Cornillon (SOAS) "Ne is an Expletive" 10.20 Maggie Tallerman (Durham) "Welsh Soft Mutation Doesn't Target Complements!" 11.00 COFFEE 11.30 Language Tutorial: Mohawk Professor Marianne Mithun (University of California, Santa Barbara) 1.00 LUNCH Session A 2.00 Margaret Deuchar and Suzanne Quay (Bangor and Tokyo) "How Early is Language Choice Possible?" 2.40 Pedro Fuentes (Salford) "Do the Features of the "Pro-Drop Parameter" form a Cluster?" Session B 2.00 Anne Cooreman and Anthony Sandford (Glasgow) "Temporal and Causal Subordination in Discourse" 2.40 Heloisa Salles (Bangor) "Argument Licensing in Ditransitive Constructions: A Minimalist Approach" Session C 2.00 Anne Zribi-Hertz (Paris 8) "Postnominal Possessives in English and French" 2.40 Mike Davenport and S. J. Hannahs (Durham) "Evidence, Counterevidence and Optimality Theory" 3.20 TEA AND CLOSE BOOKING FORM: Please return this form, with your remittance, by 9 August, to: Janig Stephens/Helen Pandeli, LAGB Autumn Meeting, School of Environmental and Human Sciences, UWIC, Llandaff, Western Avenue, Cardiff CF5 2YB. Please make cheques payable to "LAGB Cardiff 1996". ______________________________________________________________________________ NAME......................................INSTITUTION................................................................................. ADDRESS FOR THIS MAILING..................................................................................................... ............................................................................................................................................................ EMAIL ADDRESS............................................................................................................................ I enclose remittance as indicated: EITHER 1. Complete conference package (a) or (b): a) including Saturday lunch preceding workshop (i) if sent to arrive before 9 August 90-36 sterling (ii) if sent to arrive after 9 August 100-40 sterling (b) excluding Saturday lunch (i) if sent to arrive before 9 August 84-06 sterling (ii) if sent to arrive after 9 August 93-40 sterling (c) Surcharge for non-members, 5-00 sterling TOTAL: OR 2. Selected items (a) conference fee (OBLIGATORY) to cover cost of abstracts, tea and coffee, room bookings, speakers' expenses etc. 15-00 sterling (b) Saturday lunch 7-00 sterling (c) Saturday dinner 8-80 sterling (d) Overnight accommodation Saturday/Sunday 18-30 sterling (e) Breakfast Sunday 5-10 sterling (f) Sunday lunch 7-00 sterling (g) Sunday dinner 8-80 sterling (h) Overnight accommodation Sunday/Monday 18-30 sterling (i) Breakfast Monday 5-10 sterling (j) Monday lunch 7-00 sterling SUB-TOTAL: Deduct 10% if sent to arrive before 16 August: (k) Surcharge for non-members, 5-00 sterling TOTAL: OR 3. Abstracts only, for those not attending. 4-00 sterling UK....................................... 5-00 sterling overseas................................. CRECHE: Please indicate requirements here and add o40.00 per child per day to your payment: a) dates required................................ b) child's age(s)..................................................................... OTHER SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS(e.g. DIET, ACCOMMODATION)................................ ................................................................................................................................................ From tpc1 at RA.MSSTATE.EDU Thu Jul 11 07:15:41 1996 From: tpc1 at RA.MSSTATE.EDU (Thomas Price Caldwell, Jr.) Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 00:15:41 -0700 Subject: modal survey summary Message-ID: Allen: Can I have a copy of your modal survey summary? Thanks, Price From bfox at SPOT.COLORADO.EDU Thu Jul 18 18:28:29 1996 From: bfox at SPOT.COLORADO.EDU (Fox Barbara) Date: Thu, 18 Jul 1996 12:28:29 -0600 Subject: CSDL III: Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language (fwd) Message-ID: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 9 Jul 1996 13:26:34 -0600 (MDT) From: Dan Jurafsky To: cogling at ucsd.ucsd.edu Subject: CSDL III: Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language ************ CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURE, DISCOURSE and LANGUAGE III *************** ***** PRELIMINARY ANNOUNCEMENT ***** CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURE, DISCOURSE and LANGUAGE III: COGNITION AND FUNCTION IN LANGUAGE May 23-25, 1997 University of Colorado at Boulder Department of Linguistics Institute of Cognitive Science The third conference on Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language (CSDL III) will be held from May 23-25, 1997 on the BOULDER campus of the UNIVERSITY of COLORADO. This is a preliminary announcement so you can reserve the date; look for the call for papers later in the summer. We will invite papers which provide cognitive or functional analysis of linguistic phenomena, including discourse, conceptual structure, language function, metaphor, lexical semantics, pragmatics, meaning change and grammaticalization, and language processing. Organizing Committee: Laura Michaelis, Barbara Fox, Dan Jurafsky (michaeli at spot.colorado.edu, bfox at spot.colorado.edu, jurafsky at colorado.edu) From susan at UTAFLL.UTA.EDU Wed Jul 31 04:29:55 1996 From: susan at UTAFLL.UTA.EDU (Susan Herring) Date: Tue, 30 Jul 1996 23:29:55 CDT Subject: call for manuscripts: Computer-mediated conversation analysis Message-ID: ============================================================== Call for Manuscripts: COMPUTER-MEDIATED CONVERSATION High-quality manuscripts are solicited for an edited collection on the topic of COMPUTER-MEDIATED CONVERSATION, to be published by a major publisher. This will be the first book devoted entirely to linguistic and conversation analytic approaches to computer-mediated communication. Contents: Contributions may analyze any genre of verbal exchange that takes place via computer networks, including private e-mail, Listserv discussion groups, bulletin board systems, computer conferencing systems, chat, MUDs and MOOs, and multi-media systems. Contributions should report empirical, data-driven research carried out using conversation analysis or other discourse analysis methods. Possible areas of focus include topic development, floor management, turn taking, speech acts and act sequences, use of discourse markers, politeness strategies, framing, etc. In addition, all contributions should address in some way the question: to what extent are the observed properties of the discourse conditioned by the computer medium, and to what extent do they reflect social or other factors that may also be present in face-to-face communication? Submission information: Manuscripts should be 15-25 single-spaced pages in length, including references and appendices, and should follow the formatting style of Oxford University Press's Sociolinguistics series (for example, Deborah Tannen's _Framing in Discourse_, published in 1993). Submissions should be in the form of a hard copy plus a 3 1/2" Macintosh-readable diskette containing the file saved in its original format, as well as in MS Word for Macintosh (version 4 or 5). The hard copy and the diskette should be mailed to the volume editor, Susan Herring, at the following address: Susan Herring Program in Linguistics University of Texas Arlington, TX 76019 USA Deadlines: Oxford University Press has expressed interest in the project, and is requesting a preliminary version of the book manuscript for purposes of evaluation. In the interest of assembling a preliminary manuscript so as to secure a publisher as early as possible, authors are requested to submit their manuscripts to the volume editor by September 15, 1996. Interested potential authors who are undertaking relevant research, but who do not yet have a written mansucript, have the option of first submitting a 500-word abstract describing the problem, the data, the methods of analysis used, and the findings of their proposed article. On the basis of an evaluation of the abstracts, authors may be invited to submit a complete manuscript for inclusion in the volume. In such cases, the successful abstracts will be included in the preliminary manuscript that is sent to the publishers, and those authors will have until November 1, 1996 to submit a complete version of their chapter to the volume editor. Abstracts should be e-mailed to the editor as soon as possible, but in any event no later than September 15. Early submissions of both manuscripts and abstracts are welcomed. About the editor: Susan Herring is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the Unviersity of Texas at Arlington who has published numerous articles on computer-mediated communication since she first began presenting her research in this area in 1992. She is also the editor of an interdisciplinary collection entitled _Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social and Cross-Cultural Perspectives_ (John Benjamins, 1996) and guest editor of a forthcoming special issue of the _Electronic Journal of Communication_ on the topic of "Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis". For further information: Inquiries regarding this project may be e-mailed to the editor at susan at utafll.uta.edu. ===========================================================