SCLRF 2004

[Brian MacWhinney]

The next STANFORD CHILD LANGUAGE RESEARCH FORUM will take place on:

          April 16-17, 2004 (Friday-Sunday)

TOPIC: CONSTRUCTIONS IN EARLY ACQUISITON

       How do children learn constructions--noun phrases, verb
       phrases, and other phrase types?  Do they begin with
       specific lexical items in a construction and use only
       those?  To what extent do they build from 'verb islands'
       or 'noun islnds' in early constructions?  Which construc-
       tions emerge first? What criteria should we use in
       establishing productivity? What makes constructions
       easy vs. hard to acquire? Can children's bases for
       inferences about the relevant noun or verb meanings be
       identified?  Are there consistent patterns across children
       in the acquisition of constructions?  re there differences
       from one verb type to another, or from intransitive to
       transitive?  Are differences attributable to differences
       in frequencies in child-directed speech?  What cross-
       linguistic comparisons are available?  Which constructions
       have been considered in studies of children's early
       syntactic forms?

The Organizing Committee for the Stanford Child Language Research Forum
made several changes a few years ago.  Currently, CLRF meets every two
years, and focusses on one specific topic at each meeting for the
papers and posters. Constructions is the topic for 2004.

Abstracts are due on or before January 1, 2004; submitters will be
informed of all decisions by February 15, 2004.

Format for abstracts:

1. one page, double-spaced, font-size 12, with TITLE and ABSTRACT
   but no identification of author;

2. one page, with the abstract/poster title, name, affiliation,
   full mailing address, and email.


Send both pages to: CLRF-2002 Organizing Committee
                    Department of Linguistics
                    Margaret Jacks Hall, Bldg 460
                    Stanford University
                    Stanford, CA 94305-2150, USA

Check the CLRF website for information about registration, hotels,
and any further announcements about the meeting,
               www-linguistics.stanford.edu/~clrf