Reminder: ALT 8 abstracts due Jan. 12

[Johanna Nichols]

REMINDER

Association for Linguistic Typology 8th Biennial Meeting   (ALT8)
Typology and the study of language: Comparative grammar and beyond

University of California, Berkeley
July 23-26, 2009

Website: http://lsa2009.berkeley.edu/alt8

Abstracts on any topic in typology are invited for 20-minute papers,
posters, and possibly a limited number of workshops.  Non-members of ALT
may submit abstracts but will be expected to join ALT in order to present
a paper at the meeting.

ALT website:          http://www.linguistic-typology.org/

Deadline for receipt of abstracts:  Monday, January 12, 2009
Notification by Monday, March 2.

The Program Committee has taken into consideration the consensus of the
2007 meeting:  three simultaneous sessions is the maximum we can handle;
conference workdays should not be uncomfortably long or without breaks;
members submitting abstracts should be able to be confident that a good
abstract will be accepted (i.e. the acceptance rate should  not be too
low); standards should be stringent enough that only good abstracts are
accepted; workshops during the conference sessions should be limited in
number and their presentations should strictly adhere to the timing and
quality constraints on regular papers.

        FOR MORE ON WORKSHOPS, SEE BELOW.

How to submit an abstract:
One individual may be involved in a maximum of two papers (maximum of one
as sole author).  A workshop presentation by one person counts as a
single-author paper.
Send your abstract as an email attachment to:   alt8 at berkeley.edu
Subject header:   (your last name) alt8 abstract
        e.g.: hyman alt8  abstract
        (If you have a common last name, it's helpful to us if you also
include
an initial:           e.g.  jnichols alt8 abstract.)
Include these things in the body of the email:
        Author's name(s)
        Abstract title
        For workshops:  title of workshop and authors and titles of all
workshop
papers
        Contact information:  email, phone, fax

Abstract specifications:
Maximum length:  500 words.   (A second page for examples is allowed.)
Abstracts and papers should be in English.
Put this information at the top of your abstract:
        The title.
        Category:  oral; poster; either oral or poster; TPI poster (see
below)
        Format:  If at all possible, please send your abstract as a pdf.

Anonymity:  Abstracts must be anonymous.  Do not put your name or other
identifying information on the abstract.  Also, please anonymize your pdf
by removing identifying information. In general this can be done by using
the following two pull-down menus:
        File > document properties > description    (remove name of
author)
        View > comments    (though an abstract is unlikely to have
comments,
check this and remove any comments, as they will show your username)
        View >  review tracker   (ditto)
If it's your own copy of the software, you might also check:
        Acrobat > preferences > identity  (to keep your identity off of
this and
other pdf's, leave all the fields blank)

Give your pdf a filename similar to the subject header, e.g.:
        hyman_alt8_abstract.pdf

Categories of submission:
        Individual oral presentations (single or multiple author).  20
minutes +
10 minutes for discussion.
        Posters.  One or more poster sessions will be organized, depending
on
demand.
        Oral or poster.  This means you prefer an oral presentation but
can also
do a poster.  If there are more good abstracts than we can accommodate,
the Program Committee will schedule some as posters.
        If you choose either category "poster" or "oral or poster" you
will
increase your chances of acceptance.
        Workshops.   Both the sense of the 2007 meeting and the realities
of
competition for rooms during the busy UC Berkeley summer session dictate
that we have very few workshops during ALT 8.  (A workshop is a
thematically unified organized session held at the same time as other
sessions.)  We will probably schedule all workshops during the same time,
likely Sunday afternoon, July 26.  Please note the following policies:
        Each workshop presenter sends in an abstract for their
presentation.  The
workshop organizer also sends in an abstract for the workshop, about half
a page to a page in length.  (Workshop organizers can collect the
individual abstracts and attach them all to a single submission email, or
have their presenters send in their own individual abstracts.  Either way
is OK.)
        Each abstract will be reviewed in the same way as non-workshop
individual
papers, and will be individually accepted or not.  The whole workshop
abstract will also be competitively reviewed.  If all the individual
abstracts and the workshop abstract are accepted, the workshop will be
scheduled as a workshop.  If not, the accepted papers will be scheduled as
regular individual presentations (and may be scheduled together, as we
will aim for thematic unity of conference sessions where possible).  In
the case of a close call (e.g. a workshop with all but one presentation
accepted; all presentations accepted but workshop proposal not accepted;
etc.) the Program Committee will try to resolve things in as
member-friendly a way as possible.
        Maximum number of papers per workshop:  6 (or 5 if the
introduction is
more than a few sentences).  A workshop must fit into a 3-hour time slot.

        TPI posters:  Typology and public interest.  Meeting on a large
busy
campus during the LSA Institute and the general Summer Session gives
typologists an opportunity to communicate to non-typologists and
non-linguistics why and how typology is interesting and what important
discoveries are being made in typology.  Therefore we plan to schedule an
over-quota TPI poster and if possible a competition to pick the posters
(TPI and other) that do the best job of communicating the interest of
typology and/or typological phenomena of interest, and display the winners
for a longer time in a prominent display cabinet in one of the important
campus buildings.  By "over quota" we mean that TPI posters can be a
second single-author abstract.  With this TPI poster session and
competition we hope to inspire members to mobilize their graphic,
communicative, and analytic skills to produce compelling posters on such
topics as:
        • Typological rarities and other phenomena of interest, previously
published or not.  These might include findings from recent fieldwork for
which you have a squib-like presentation, phenomena noted in published
literature, proposed correlations, etc.
        • Public communications making clear in not-too-technical terms
the
interest of something you have already published or are publishing (or
e.g. presenting at this conference).
        • Examples of best practice in typological work
        • Demonstrations of software and its applications
        • Teaching materials, curriculum, etc.



-- 
Johanna Nichols
Professor, Slavic Languages and Affiliate Professor, Linguistics
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, mailcode 2979
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720
ph  510-642-1097          fax  510-642-6220