28.903, Calls: Lang Acquisition, Neuroling, Psycholing, Syntax, Typology/Croatia

Thu Feb 16 19:11:38 UTC 2017

LINGUIST List: Vol-28-903. Thu Feb 16 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.903, Calls: Lang Acquisition, Neuroling, Psycholing, Syntax, Typology/Croatia

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Date: Thu, 16 Feb 2017 14:11:31
From: Franc Lanko Marušič [lanko.marusic at gmail.com]
Subject: Resolving Conflicts Across Borders 2017

Full Title: Resolving Conflicts Across Borders 2017 
Short Title: RCAB 2017 

Date: 20-Oct-2017 - 22-Oct-2017
Location: Dubrovnik, Croatia 
Contact Person: Anita Peti-Stantić
Meeting Email: rcab.sinfonija10 at gmail.com
Web Site: https://sites.google.com/view/rcab-sinfonija10/rcab 

Linguistic Field(s): Language Acquisition; Neurolinguistics; Psycholinguistics; Syntax; Typology 

Call Deadline: 01-Mar-2017 

Meeting Description:

Resolving Conflicts Across Borders Conference 2017, like the Agreement ABC
2015 (Zadar) and the Ellipsis ABC 2016 (Sarajevo) that preceded it, is
organized as part of the project Experimental Morphosyntax of South Slavic
languages, where agreement patterns are studied with a uniform methodology in
six locations across the Western Balkans. This project has both a scientific
and social agenda. On one side, it aims to investigate First and Last conjunct
agreement in South Slavic languages and thus contribute to the currently
debated topic (Bošković 2009, Marušič et al. 2015) which revolves around the
need for clearer descriptions of the data. On the other side, the project aims
to propagate psycholinguistic studies of South Slavic languages through
cooperation between linguists across the borders of the former Yugoslavia.

One of the areas where conflict resolution is very clearly observed is
agreement. As a syntactic operation it is best understood when it operates
between a probe and a goal (or between a target and a controller) that carries
a single set of features, which can be easily identified and copied to the
probe/target. However, goals/controllers don't always have a single gender or
number feature that could be shared with the probe/target. For example, when
two noun phrases of different (or conflicting) genders are conjoined, verb
cannot agree with both of them at the same time (unless it is a case of
syncretism). This ''conflict'' can be resolved in a number of ways. For
conjunct agreement three strategies have been observed across languages: verb
agrees with only one of the two conjuncts, verb shows default value for
agreement, verb agrees with the ''winner'' of the conflict, i.e. with the
resolved value. 

Similar conflicts do not occur only with coordinations, a single noun phrase
can have two conflicting gender or number features, e.g. words like ''team''
are morphosyntactically singular, but semantically plural, while words like
''scissors'' are morphosyntactically plural, while semantically singular or
plural (can be used for a single entity, a single pair of scissors). Similarly
the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian noun ‘budala’ (idiot) is morphosyntactically
feminine, but can easily denote male individuals in which case it is
semantically masculine. Still within the realm of phi-features, conflicts
arise in free relative configurations (Groos & van Riemsdijk 1981), where a
relative pronoun cannot simultaneously realize two different cases one
assigned from the main clause and the other assigned from inside the relative
clause.

In fact, conflict resolution occurs also in many other areas of grammar. We
wish to cross the borders traditionally bounding research on conflict
resolution and bring together both theoreticians and experimentalists
conducting research on phenomena where conflict resolution is observed, not
only in syntax but also on the interfaces, e.g. syntax-phonology,
syntax-morphology, syntax-semantics, phonology-morphology, and at the
information structure – phonology interface. In addition to identifying the
domains in which conflict resolution occurs, of equal interest are the
architectural mechanisms for deciding among alternative outputs, a process
that finds resonance in closely related domains such as music (Lerdahl &
Jackendoff 1983).

RCAB Invited speakers:

- Eulàlia Bonet (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
- Greville G. Corbett (University of Surrey)
- Ray Jackendoff (Tufts University) 

2nd Call for Papers:

Resolving Conflicts Across Borders Conference 2017 is the third conference in
the series ABC organized as part of the project Experimental Morphosyntax of
South Slavic languages (EMSS). The first two were: Agreement ABC 2015 (Zadar)
and the Ellipsis ABC 2016 (Sarajevo) 

Papers on any topic related to conflict resolution in Grammar are invited. One
of the areas where conflict resolution is very clearly observed is agreement.
Goals/controllers of agreement don't always have a single gender or number
feature that could be shared with the probe/target. For example, when two noun
phrases of different (or conflicting) genders are conjoined, verb cannot agree
with both of them at the same time (unless it is a case of syncretism). This
''conflict'' can be resolved in a number of ways. For conjunct agreement three
strategies have been observed across languages: verb agrees with only one of
the two conjuncts, verb shows default value for agreement, verb agrees with
the ''winner'' of the conflict, i.e. with the resolved value. 

Similar conflicts do not occur only with coordinations, a single noun phrase
can have two conflicting gender or number features, e.g. words like ''team''
are morphosyntactically singular, but semantically plural, while words like
''scissors'' are morphosyntactically plural, while semantically singular or
plural (can be used for a single entity, a single pair of scissors). Similarly
the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian noun ‘budala’ (idiot) is morphosyntactically
feminine, but can easily denote male individuals in which case it is
semantically masculine. Still within the realm of phi-features, conflicts
arise in free relative configurations (Groos & van Riemsdijk 1981), where a
relative pronoun cannot simultaneously realize two different cases one
assigned from the main clause and the other assigned from inside the relative
clause.

In fact, conflict resolution occurs also in many other areas of grammar. In
principle every interaction of more than one grammatical element has potential
to result in a conflict that needs some kind of resolution (where one of the
grammatical principles wins over the other). We wish to cross the borders
traditionally bounding research on conflict resolution and bring together both
theoreticians and experimentalists conducting research on phenomena where
conflict resolution is observed, not only in syntax but also on the
interfaces, e.g. syntax-phonology interface, syntax-morphology interface
(deponency), syntax-semantics interface, phonology-morphology interface, and
at the information structure – phonology interface. In addition to identifying
the domains in which conflict resolution occurs, of equal interest are the
architectural mechanisms for deciding among alternative outputs, a process
that finds resonance in closely related domains such as music (Lerdahl &
Jackendoff 1983).

With this broad set of approaches in mind, we invite submission of clearly
written and theoretically innovative abstracts for talks on topics on conflict
resolution in all areas of theoretical linguistics (across any theory),
comparative linguistics, typological linguistics, psycholinguistics,
neurolinguistics, language acquisition, and clinical linguistics.

Abstracts (2 pages A4 including references) are accepted through easychair - 
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=rcab_sinfonija10 

More information available on the conference website:
https://sites.google.com/view/rcab-sinfonija10/rcab

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