[HPSG-L] HPSG 2020 Conference -- Call for online organizers

[Rui Chaves]

Greetings,
I am writing to you on behalf of the Standing Committee for the
International HPSG Conference. We hope you and your
families are safe and well.

As you know, the 27th International Conference on Head-driven Phrase
Structure Grammar was scheduled to take place at
the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. Out of respect for the
safety of everyone given the current pandemic, the Standing
Committee has decided that the conference cannot take place as
planned. This is a disappointing and painful decision to everyone,
but it is simply impossible to predict when international travel and
academic life will return to normal. we thank Frank Van Eynde and
Liesbeth Augustinus, the local organizers, for all the hard work that
they put into the conference.

Nevertheless, we plan to still hold a conference remotely, and to have
the papers that were accepted for this year's conference to
appear in the proceedings, as usual. We are therefore making a call
for volunteers from the HPSG community to organize a virtual
conference, to be held perhaps around the same time as originally scheduled
(17-19 August 2020). Those who are interested and able to
do this, please let me know as soon as possible.

An online conference is not ideal, of course, but it does have certain
important positives: it is more inclusive, more environmentally
friendly, and naturally much better than no conference at all. This is
an opportunity for us to rise to the occasion.

Rui Chaves
-- 
_________________________________________________
Rui P. Chaves, PhD
Associate Professor
Department of Linguistics, University at Buffalo - SUNY

URL: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~rchaves/
Mail: 609, Baldy Hall, Buffalo NY 14260-1030
Phone: (+1 716) 645-0133