15.3511, Calls: General Ling/USA; Linguistic Theories/USA

[LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-15-3511. Thu Dec 16 2004. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 15.3511, Calls: General Ling/USA; Linguistic Theories/USA

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        Terry Langendoen, U of Arizona

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1)
Date: 14-Dec-2004
From: Regina Morin < rmorin at tcnj.edu >
Subject: 34th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest

2)
Date: 14-Dec-2004
From: Anna Maria Di Sciullo < di_sciullo.anne-marie at uqam.ca >
Subject: Issues on the Form and Interpretation of Argument Structure


-------------------------Message 1 ----------------------------------
Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2004 18:57:09
From: Regina Morin < rmorin at tcnj.edu >
Subject:  34th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest


Full Title: 34th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest
Short Title: LASSO 2005

Date: 07-Oct-2005 - 09-Oct-2005
Location: Lubbock, Texas, United States of America
Contact Person: Colleen Fitzgerald
Meeting Email: colleen.fitzgerald at ttu.edu

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics

Call Deadline: 01-Jun-2005

Meeting Description:

Conference Theme: Interfaces

Plenary Address by Lyle Campbell
University of Utah

Presidential Address by Domnita Dumitrescu
California State University Los Angeles

E-MAIL 250-500 WORD ABSTRACTS TO colleen.fitzgerald at ttu.edu

SUBMISSIONS
-Abstracts for papers or posters in any area of linguistics are welcome,
although proposals on the theme are particularly encouraged, as are
proposals dealing with language issues of special interest in the Southwest.
-Presentation time for papers will be twenty minutes plus ten minutes for
discussion.
-Proposals for complete panels with 2-4 speakers may also be submitted.
-Only one abstract as single author and a second as co-author will be
accepted from any one individual.
-Submissions by graduate students are welcome, and students are eligible
for the Helmut Esau Prize, a $250 cash award made annually for the best
student paper.
-Abstracts should be 250-500 words; over-long abstracts will not be
considered.  Abstracts should summarize the main points of the paper and
describe key aspects of the data, methodology, and argumentation.  Use of
special font items should be kept to a bare minimum.  Abstracts will be
distributed as received in the conference packet.
-At the beginning of the abstract, write the title of the paper.  At the
end of the abstract, repeat the title and also list the author's name (if
more than one author, list names in the order they should appear in the
program), academic affiliation, mailing address, telephone number, and e-mail.
-It is essential that the cover message also include the e-mail address,
telephone number, and postal address where the author may be reached during
the summer if the author will not be available at his/her usual address
during the summer.
-Abstracts should be e-mailed to colleen.fitzgerald at ttu.edu as a Microsoft
Word attachment.  Note that special font items may not travel well
electronically.  In addition to sending the abstract as an attachment,
please paste the text of the abstract into the e-mail message itself.
Authors who do not have access to e-mail may send a disk copy with a paper
copy of their abstract to Colleen Fitzgerald, Department of English, Texas
Tech University, Lubbock, TX 79409-3091.
-Submitters will receive an e-mail reply notifying them that their
abstracts have been received and will be considered.  If such notification
has not been received within one week, that means the abstract did not
reach its destination and should be resent.
-Authors will be notified by early July as to whether their papers have
been accepted.
-Participation in LASSO is a privilege of membership; this means that an
individual must be a current member in order to be listed in the conference
program.  For membership information, contact Executive Director Patricia
MacGregor-Mendoza at pmacgreg at nmsu.edu.

For further information, contact local arrangements chairs
maryjane.hurst at ttu.edu  or colleen.fitzgerald at ttu.edu




-------------------------Message 2 ----------------------------------
Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2004 18:57:22
From: Anna Maria Di Sciullo < di_sciullo.anne-marie at uqam.ca >
Subject:  Issues on the Form and Interpretation of Argument Structure



Full Title: Issues on the Form and Interpretation of Argument Structure

Date: 01-Jul-2005 - 01-Jul-2005
Location: Cambridge, MA, United States of America
Contact Person: Anna Maria Di Sciullo
Meeting Email: di_sciullo.anne-marie at uqam.ca

Linguistic Field(s): Linguistic Theories

Call Deadline: 01-Mar-2005

Meeting Description:

Issues on the Form and Interpretation of Argument Structure
LSA Linguistic Institute Workshop
Cambridge, MA
July 1, 2005

The proper characterization of argument structure is a central question of
any approach seeking to elucidate even the most basic properties of
linguistic structure.  One can group the approaches attempting to tackle
this question into two major research camps, putting aside small details
among the approaches within each camp. On the one hand, one can contrast a
projectionist approach (Tenny 1987, 1992, 1994; Levin 1999, 2002 and
related work), according to which verbs lexically determine the expression
of their arguments, to a constructionist approach (Arad 1998, Borer 1998,
and related works) according to which argument structure is constructed in
the syntax rather than being  lexically determined. Alongside these
approaches one can also distinguish what has been referred to as the
Davidsonian tradition (Davidson 1967, Dowty 1979, Parson 1990 and related
works) emphasizing the importance of events in the characterization of the
argument structure of verbs.

>From the standpoint of semantic interpretation, there are a number of
foundational questions ripe for investigation. Thematic roles, for example,
have long been among the most widely-used tools in the analysis of argument
structure (dating back to at least Gruber 1965 and Fillmore 1968), but
their precise nature and proper place in grammar remain controversial. In
formal semantics, there is a curious ambivalence: in neo-Davidsonian
theories, thematic roles are among the basic components of meaning, while
in more traditional versions of model-theoretic semantics, they may be
entirely superfluous. A third possibility is that only certain thematic
roles---perhaps only 'agent'---play an essential role (the
'semi-neo-Davidsonian' view of Kratzer 1996). Discussions of such issues
are complicated by lingering questions about the content of thematic roles.
As has been pointed out by e.g. Levin and Rappaport 1996, there is a
disturbing lack of clear diagnostics for particular semantic roles. Indeed,
it may not be possible to straightforwardly pin down their semantic
contribution (as Dowty 1991's notion of 'proto-role' implies).

There are also important unresolved issues surrounding the basic mechanisms
by which predicates are linked to their arguments in a syntactic
configuration. Is this a process that proceeds compositionally (and hence
incrementally, node-by-node), or are there certain aspects of argument
structure that are better understood as fundamentally non-compositional, as
has been suggested (by e.g. Goldberg 1996)? Are there special modes of
semantic composition by which certain arguments are introduced (von
Geenhoven 1998, Chung and Ladusaw 2003)? What special properties might
distinguish points in a representation at which a predicate has been
saturated? Might this shed light on the role of phases in a derivation and
on related questions of cyclicity?

Related to these issues is a broader family of questions concerning the
means by which lexical semantics interfaces with syntactic structure and
compositional semantics? There are many conceptions of what semantic
information must be encoded in a lexical entry, and of how this information
should be represented. Each of these conceptions may provide different
answers to questions like where the semantic locus of variation is in
argument structure alternations, for example---in the lexical semantics, in
the syntax and compositional semantics, or in both? And how (and to what
extent) does lexical semantic information predict what the syntactic
properties of arguments a predicate may occur with?

Further questions arise with respect to the properties of the interfaces
between the grammar and the external systems, conceptual-intentional and
sensorimotor. For example, assuming that argument structure is a set of
relations interpreted at the semantic interface, the questions we intend to
address in this workshop include, but are not limited to, the following: a)
What is the property of structural relations that makes argument structure
interpretable at the semantic interface? Is sister-contain the only legible
relation at the Interfaces?  b) What is the minimal domain for the
interpretation of argument structure? Does the notion of a phase coincide
with the notion of interpretable argument structure domain? c) What enables
the contact between the argument structure domains and the external
systems? That is: How is argument structure knowledge paired with
conceptual intentional knowledge? How is argument structure used in
presupposition and inferential structure? How is argument structure used in
pragmatic/information structure? What is the psycho evidence (learning,
comprehension, natural process, rapidity in comprehension)? What is the
computational evidence (reduction of computational complexity)?
The purpose of this workshop is to address questions about the form and the
interpretation of argument structure from different theoretical
perspectives and to raise the question of whether a novel integrated
approach can be envisioned.

Invited Speakers:
Hagit Borer (USC)
Adele Goldberg (Princeton)
Angelika Kratzer (UMASS)
Beth Levin (Stanford)
Liina Pylkkanen (NYU)
James Pustejovsky (Brandeis)
Carol Tenny (Carnegie Mellon)

Call for papers:
Abstracts are invited for thirty-minute talks (twenty minutes for
presentation plus ten minutes for discussion). Send abstracts by e-mail to:
di_sciullo.anne-marie at uqam.ca before March 1st 2005. Abstracts should be
attached in plain text format or as Word files and should be no longer than
one page plus one page for examples and references. The author's
information (name, affiliation, postal address, and e-mail address)
together with the title of the paper should be in a separate file or
included as part of the body of the e-mail message.

Deadline:
All submissions must be received by March 1st 2005
Notification of acceptance will be e-mailed by April 15th 2005

Sponsors:
SSHRC, MCRI on Interface Asymmetry,
The Federation on Natural Language Processing

Organizers:
Anna Maria Di Sciullo, Calixto Aguero-Bautista, Marcin Morzycki
UQAM






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