29.4271, Calls: Language Acquisition, Psycholinguistics, Semantics, Syntax/USA

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-29-4271. Thu Nov 01 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.4271, Calls: Language Acquisition, Psycholinguistics, Semantics, Syntax/USA

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Date: Thu, 01 Nov 2018 17:34:25
From: Virginia Dawson [virginia.dawson at berkeley.edu]
Subject: BLS Workshop: Countability Distinctions

 
Full Title: BLS Workshop: Countability Distinctions 

Date: 08-Feb-2019 - 09-Feb-2019
Location: Berkeley, CA, USA 
Contact Person: Virginia Dawson
Meeting Email: blsworkshop at berkeley.edu
Web Site: http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/bls/ 

Linguistic Field(s): Language Acquisition; Psycholinguistics; Semantics; Syntax 

Call Deadline: 30-Nov-2018 

Meeting Description:

Countability distinctions and mass nouns are a topic of long-standing interest
in semantics, grammar, and the philosophy and psychology of language. Recent
work on this topic has pushed our understanding forward in three separate but
related directions:

1. There is more than one type of countability distinction relevant to natural
language: nouns like furniture are different from nouns like sand both in how
quantity judgments are carried out (Barner and Snedeker 2005) and in which
types of adjectival modification are possible (Rothstein 2010, Schwarzschild
2011).

2. A semantics for mass nouns can be given that captures the many grammatical
parallels between water and furniture without ascribing the same status to the
minimal elements in their denotations (Chierchia 2010, Landman 2011). 

3. The crosslinguistic picture on countability distinctions is more nuanced
than originally thought: there are languages where all nouns combine with
numerals in apparently similar ways (Lima 2014, Deal 2017), and in languages
where classifiers are necessary to mediate noun-numeral combinations, there
nevertheless exist countability-related distinctions among nouns diagnosable
by quantity judgments and adjective distribution (Cheung, Li, and Barner 2010,
Rothstein 2010).

For this workshop, held in place of the general meeting of the Berkeley
Linguistics Society, we invite submissions for talks on all aspects of
countability distinctions in natural language. Submissions may address
questions including, though not limited to, the following: 

- What are the ways in which countability distinctions are manifested in
particular languages? 
- Are morphosyntactic differences in the distribution of count versus mass
nouns traceable directly to their semantics, or to their syntax, or to both? 
- What do countability distinctions show us about nominal semantics? What do
they teach us about nominal syntax?
- How should we choose among theories of mass noun semantics (or syntax)
currently on the market?
- Are countability distinctions a language universal? Which distinctions are
subject to variation (if any), and which (if any) are not? 
- How are countability distinctions represented psychologically, and acquired
by children? 

Invited speakers (confirmed):
David Barner (UC San Diego)
Suzi Lima (University of Toronto)

Conference website: http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/bls/
Contact: blsworkshop at berkeley.edu 

Organizing Committee:
Emily Clem, Virginia Dawson, Amy Rose Deal, Paula Floro, Peter Jenks, Tyler
Lemon, Line Mikkelsen, Tessa Scott, Yi-Chi Wu


Call for Papers:

Submission deadline: November 30, 2018 

Abstracts should be submitted in PDF format via EasyChair:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=blsw1

Abstracts should not exceed two pages in length (12-point type, Times New
Roman, single line spacing, 1 inch margins) including examples and references.

Submissions must be anonymous and are limited to a maximum of one individual
and one joint abstract per author or two joint abstracts per author. 

Reviews and notifications of acceptance will be returned to authors by
mid-December. 

Note that there will be no general session of BLS this year.




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