Columbia School Linguistics Conference Announcement

[Garrison, Leigh]

10th International Columbia School Conference on the Interaction of Linguistic Form and Meaning with Human Behavior 

Conference theme:  Grammatical analysis and the discovery of meaning

October 9-11, 2010
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, New Jersey

Invited speakers:
Flora Klein-Andreu (Stony Brook University)
Linguistics for non-linguists

Andrea Tyler (Georgetown University)
Connecting Spatial Particles and Aspect Markers: Applying the Principled Polysemy Model to Russian za

List of presenters:
Tanya Karoli Christensen (Copenhagen University)
Sign combinations in context: Imperatives and modal particles in Danish

Ellen Contini-Morava (University of Virginia)
The meaning(s?) of non-animate deictic markers in Swahili

Joseph Davis (The City College – CUNY)
Diver’s Latin voice and case

Bob de Jonge (University of Groningen)
Phonology as Human Behaviour revisited: The case of Romance languages

Thomas Eccardt (Independent scholar)
Pitch and aperture: Two articulatory scalars in comparison

Richard Epstein (Rutgers University)
Some discourse uses of the distal demonstrative determiner in Beowulf

Elena Even-Simkin, Yishai Tobin (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)
Internal vowel alternation as a phonological-semantic sign system in English according to the sign-oriented theory of the Columbia School

Alan Huffman (The Graduate Center – CUNY)
The phonological motivation for Verner's Law and Grimm's Law

Robert Kirsner (University of California, Los Angeles)
Minimal units, their context, and the insufficiency of conceptual metaphor:  Revisiting the Dutch dismissive idiom ho maar ‘fuhgeddaboudit, of course not!’

Robert Leonard (Hofstra University)
Linguistic meaning, pragmatics and context:  Semantic analysis of evidence in a double homicide trial seeking to weigh intent

Lin Lin (University of California, Los Angeles)
Rethinking of the Chinese demonstratives in the Columbia School framework

Carol Moder (Oklahoma State University)
Dirty hands, dirty work:  Usage-based noun modification

Ricardo Otheguy (The Graduate Center – CUNY)
A report on current research on Spanish in New York

Wallis Reid (Rutgers University)
English verb number:  Syntactic or semantic?

Hidemi Riggs (Soka University of America)
The structure of Japanese conditionals in Modern Japanese:  A grammatical account from a functional linguistics perspective

Nancy Stern (The City College – CUNY)
Ourself, themself, and more:  The communicative function of Number in -self pronouns

Lavi Wolf, Yishai Tobin (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)
Phonological proclivities across languages according to the theory of Phonology as Human Behavior


The Columbia School is a group of linguists developing the theoretical framework origi¬nally established by the late William Diver.  Language is seen as a symbolic tool whose structure is shaped both by its communicative function and by the characteristics of its human users.  Grammatical analyses account for the distribution of linguistic forms as an interaction between linguistic meaning and pragmatic and functional factors such as inference, ease of processing, and iconicity.  Phonological analyses explain the syntag¬matic and paradigmatic distribution of phonological units within signals, also drawing on both communicative function and human physiological and psychological characteristics. 

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The support of 
The Columbia School Linguistic Society 
is gratefully acknowledged 

www.csling.org 
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Selected Columbia School bibliography: 

Contini-Morava, Ellen, Robert S. Kirsner, and Betsy Rodriguez-Bachiller (eds.).  2005.  Cognitive and Communicative Approaches to Linguistic Analysis.  Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Contini-Morava, Ellen, and Barbara Sussman Goldberg (eds.).  1995.  Meaning as Explanation:  Advances in Linguistic Sign Theory.  Berlin:  Mouton de Gruyter.   

Davis, Joseph, Radmila Gorup, and Nancy Stern (eds.).  2006. Advances in Functional Linguistics: Columbia School beyond its origins.  Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Huffman, Alan.  1997.  The Categories of Grammar:  French lui and le.  Amsterdam/Philadelphia:  John Benjamins. 

Huffman, Alan.  2001.  “The Linguistics of William Diver and the Columbia School.”  WORD 52:1, 29-68. 

Reid, Wallis.  1991. Verb and Noun Number in English:  A Functional Explanation.  London:  Longman. 

Reid, Wallis, Ricardo Otheguy, and Nancy Stern (eds.).  2002.   Signal, Meaning, and Message:  Perspectives on Sign-Based Linguistics.  Amsterdam/Philadelphia:  John Benjamins.
 
Tobin, Yishai.  1997.  Phonology as Human Behavior:  Theoretical Implications and Clinical Applications.  Durham:  Duke U Press.

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For more information, please contact Joseph Davis at jdavis at ccny.cuny.edu