ALT News No. 41

Thu Jun 28 22:09:23 UTC 2007

ALT News No. 41
June 2007

1. ALT VII, Paris 2007
2. Future ALT conferences
3. Greenberg and Panini awards
4. Membership renewal
5. Slate for ALT Officers
6. Grammar watch
7. Recent publications
8. Other conferences

1. ALT VII, Paris 2007

The ALT Conference is shaping up as the largest and most exciting to date, with an unprecedented number of paper submissions, associated workshops, and special speakers. In addition to the winners of the Panini and Greenberg Awards, plenaries will be given on Sign Language Typology by Ulrike Zeshan and Waldemar Schwager, and on Aphasiology and Language Diversity by Jean-Luc Nespoulous. For full details of the conference and associated activities, see the website: 

http://www.alt7.cnrs.fr/

Note that accommodation during the second half of September in Paris will be at a premium owing to various other major events, so make your hotel bookings as soon as possible to avoid disappointment.

2. Future ALT Conferences

UC Berkeley has begun its planning for the 2009 ALT Conference, which will coincide with the LSA Institute to be held there at UC Berkeley from late June to early August.

Now that we have a four-year planning cycle in place, it is also time to start thinking of venues for the 2011 Conference. Potential hosts are warmly invited to prepare a short preliminary bid so as to begin discussions during the Paris Conference.

3. Greenberg and Panini awards

These two awards, each for a doctoral dissertation in typology, have each received a brace of highly competitive submissions: ten for the Greenberg Award, and nine for the Panini Award. The juries have worked or continue to be working under the Chairmanship of Eva Schultze-Berndt and Marianne Mithun respectively. To receive nineteen submissions for doctoral awards, taken together, is a most encouraging sign of how much new research is going on among young typologists and a vote of confidence in the future of our field.
	A number of publishers have pledged donations to the book prizes that will from this year on be part of these awards. We will be announcing full details once these are finalized, since some are still under negotiation, but in the meantime we would like to thank (in alphabetical order) Mouton de Gruyter, Oxford University Press, Pacific Linguistics, Routledge, University of British Columbia Press, and University of Hawaii Press for their generous pledges towards the book prizes associated with these awards.
	Meanwhile the jury of the Panini Award has finished its work and its chairperson, Marianne Mithun, hereby announces that the winner is Patience Epps (Texas, Austin) for her Grammar of Hup. The prize is given for the best grammar passed as a dissertation in a four-year period. To be eligible for the prize, a grammar must provide ‘a systematic, accessible, comprehensive, original, insightful and typologically well-informed account of the workings of the language being described, generously exemplified with natural data’. Ten excellent grammars were submitted for this competition, nearly every one highly deserving of the top award. 
	Hup is the language of the Hupde, a semi-nomadic people of the Maku (or Nadahup) family of Amazonia. The Hup grammar was cited for its exhaustive treatment of the sense, distribution, and function of every grammatical entity, for the subtlety of interpretation of native texts and native words reflecting the immersion of the author in the daily life and culture of the Hupde, and for the sophisticated theoretical, typological, diachronic, and typological knowledge against which the description is cast. Special admiration was expressed for the quality of the fieldwork underlying the description, work conducted under demanding physical and social conditions.
	The Panini jury members were Marianne Mithun Chair, Alexandra Aikhenvald, Bernard Comrie, Greville Corbett, Nikolaus Himmelmann, Tom Payne, Ger Reesink, Keren Rice, Anna Siewierska, and Dietmar Zaefferer.

4. Membership renewal

The arrival of Volume 11 of Linguistic Typology will be followed by the arrival of the annual invoice. Please note that by far the easiest way to retain membership is to have a standing order on a credit card (see http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fss/organisations/alt/PAYDET.HTM)

5. Slate for ALT Officers

The nominating committee has prepared the following slate of office-holders, to assume office subject to confirmation by electronic voting shortly after the Paris Conference. 

President: Anna Siewierska  (Lancaster)
Secretary/Treasurer: Jean-Christophe Verstraete (Leuven)
Editor-in-chief Linguistics: Frans Plank (Konstanz)
Executive Committee:
	Grev Corbett (Surrey)
	Scott DeLancey (Oregon)
	Nicholas Evans (Melbourne)
	John Hawkins (Cambridge / UC Davis)
Editorial Board (New Members)
	Joan Bybee (New Mexico)
	Guglielmo Cinque (Venice)
	Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm (Stockholm)

We would also like to thank the members of the nominating committee for their considered and delicate work in coming up with this slate: Edith Moravcsik (Chair), Kees Hengeveld, Maria Polinsky, and Jae-Jung Song. 

6. Grammar watch – See attachment

7. Recent publications – See attachment

8. Other conferences

Paris, October 4-5 2007
Not quite adjacent in time but still adjacent in place and theme is the International Conference answering the question “Where Do Features Come From? Phonological Primitives in the Brain, the Mouth, and the Ear”. See http://phoneticbases.free.fr/

Seoul, July 21-26 2008
The organizers of the 18th International Congress of Linguists have announced that the deadline for abstracts to all workshops and parallel sessions has been extended to August 31 2007. See http://www.cil18.org/

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-

Nick Evans[President]
Linguistics
University of Melbourne                tel +61 3 8344 8988
Parkville Victoria                     fax +61 3 8344 8990
Australia
E-mail:                                 nrd at unimelb.edu.au

Frans Plank [Editor-in-chief, Linguistic Typology]
Sprachwissenschaft
Universität Konstanz
D-78457 Konstanz                   tel + 49 7531 88 26 56
Germany                            fax + 49 7531 88 27 41
E-mail:                       frans.plank at uni-konstanz.de

Johan van der Auwera [Secretary-Treasurer]
Linguistiek
Universiteit Antwerpen
B-2610 Antwerpen                     tel + 32 3 820 27 76
Belgium                              fax + 32 3 820 27 62
E-mail:                       johan.vanderauwera at ua.ac.be

On the WEB:  http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fss/organisations/alt/
Webmaster : Peter Kahrel         p.kahrel at lancaster.ac.uk

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