18.1605, Calls: General Ling/Germany; Computational Ling/USA

Sat May 26 17:19:44 UTC 2007

LINGUIST List: Vol-18-1605. Sat May 26 2007. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 18.1605, Calls: General Ling/Germany; Computational Ling/USA

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Eastern Michigan U <aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U <hdry at linguistlist.org>

Reviews: Laura Welcher, Rosetta Project  
       <reviews at linguistlist.org> 

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org/

The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University, 
and donations from subscribers and publishers.

Editor for this issue: Ania Kubisz <ania at linguistlist.org>
================================================================  

As a matter of policy, LINGUIST discourages the use of abbreviations
or acronyms in conference announcements unless they are explained in
the text.

To post to LINGUIST, use our convenient web form at 
http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.html. 

===========================Directory==============================  

1)
Date: 25-May-2007
From: Carsten Breul < breul at uni-wuppertal.de >
Subject: Contrastive Information Structure Analysis 

2)
Date: 25-May-2007
From: Emily Bender < ebender at u.washington.edu >
Subject: Grammar Engineering across Frameworks 2007

-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sat, 26 May 2007 13:14:51
From: Carsten Breul < breul at uni-wuppertal.de >
Subject: Contrastive Information Structure Analysis  

Full Title: Contrastive Information Structure Analysis 
Short Title: CISA 

Date: 18-Mar-2008 - 19-Mar-2008
Location: Wuppertal, Germany 
Contact Person: Carsten Breul
Meeting Email: cisa-08 at uni-wuppertal.de
Web Site: http://www.cisa-2008.de 

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 31-Aug-2007 

Meeting Description:
The aim of this conference is to provide a forum for the presentation of original 
research that addresses empirical or theoretical questions of information 
structure from an explicitly contrastive perspective. The range of languages to 
be dealt with is not restricted, but we would prefer to have at least one of the 
languages to be contrasted to be English, German, French, Italian, or Spanish. 
(For a more detailed description see below, or the conference website at 
www.cisa-2008.de.) 

2nd Call for Papers

Invited Speakers:
Prof. Dr. Manfred Krifka (Humboldt-U Berlin & ZAS Berlin) (to be confirmed)
Prof. Dr. Knud Lambrecht (U of Texas at Austin)

Advisory Board:
Prof. Dr. Paul Boucher (U of Angers)
Dr. Edward Göbbel (U of Tübingen)
Prof. Dr. Joachim Jacobs (U of Wuppertal)
Prof. Dr. Susanne Uhmann (U of Wuppertal)
Prof. Dr. Susanne Winkler (U of Tübingen)

Organiser:
Prof. Dr. Carsten Breul (U of Wuppertal)

Important dates and addresses:
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 31 Aug 2007
Notification of acceptance: 1 Dec 2007
Conference: 18 - 19 Mar 2008
E-mail address for abstracts: cisa-08 at uni-wuppertal.de
Conference website: www.cisa-2008.de

Abstracts:
We invite abstracts in RTF, DOC or PDF format for 30 minutes talks (plus 10 
minutes for discussion). Abstracts should be no longer than one page of A4 plus 
one page for references, with 2.5 cm margins on all sides, 1.5 line spacing, typed 
in Times New Roman, 12 p. Please send two copies of your abstract; one of  
these should be anonymous and one should include your name, affiliation and e-
mail address at the top of the page, directly below the title. All abstracts will be 
reviewed anonymously by members of the advisory board.

Rationale:
The notion of information structure underlying this conference refers to the
grammatical properties of sentences that encode ''a speaker's assumptions
concerning the hearer's state of mind at the time of an utterance'' (Lambrecht 
1994). More specifically, what is relevant here is the addressee's state of mind as 
concerns their mental representation of the discourse. The communicator's aim 
and task in uttering a sentence is to supply information, or to be 'relevant' in 
Sperber & Wilson's (1986/1995) sense, in order to effect a modification of the 
addressee's representation of the discourse. Information structure thus 
conceived comprises two basic types of grammatical properties: (a) Properties 
relating to the communicator's assumptions about whether a given entity or 
proposition is known to the addressee and whether he is aware of it at the time 
of the utterance. Grammatical categories associated with such properties include 
(in)definiteness, (non-)specificity, mood, pronominal/zero versus full lexical 
coding, sentence versus embedded clause. (b) Properties relating to the 
communicator's assumptions about vacant information slots recently created in 
the process of the addressee's representation of the discourse. Information 
being propositional in nature, such slots have to be filled by expressions capable 
of denoting a proposition at the given point of
the discourse, i.e. by complete or elliptical sentences. Moreover, in order to
be 'relevant', in Sperber & Wilson's (1986/1995) sense, these expressions have 
to provide clues that help the addressee to determine which recently created 
information slot is to be filled by the utterance. The grammatical categories 
associated with such aspects of sentence grammar have been subsumed under 
the notion of focus structure. They include concepts such as background and 
focus, theme and rheme, sentence versus predicate versus argument focus (or 
thetic versus categorical versus identificational sentences). Intonation plays an 
important role in signalling assumptions of the kinds mentioned in (a) and (b) as 
well. Independently of the question of how intonation relates to syntax, it is clear 
that intonational properties may
express categories of information structure instead of or in combination with 
morpho-syntactic properties. Contrastive, or comparative, analyses can be found 
in numerous works on various aspects of information structure (see e.g. 
Lambrecht 1994, Schwabe & Winkler (eds.) 2007). However, the contrastive 
approach has seldom provided the explicit
and guiding perspective in this field (for recent works that do take an
explicitly contrastive/comparative approach, see e.g. Doherty 2005, Drubig 
2003, Frey 2005, Hasselgård & Johansson & Behrens & Fabricius-Hansen (eds.) 
2002).

References:
Doherty, M. 2005. ''Topic-worthiness in German and English''. Linguistics 43: 
181-206.
Drubig, H. B. 2003. ''Toward a typology of focus and focus constructions''.
Linguistics 41: 1-50.
Frey, W. 2005. ''Pragmatic properties of certain German and English left
peripheral constructions''. Linguistics 43: 89-129.
Hasselgård, H. & Johansson, S. & Behrens, B. & Fabricius-Hansen, C. (eds.).
2002. Information structure in a cross-linguistic perspective. Amsterdam & New 
York.
Lambrecht, K. 1994. Information structure and sentence form: Topic, focus, and 
the mental representation of discourse referents. Cambridge et al.
Schwabe, K. & Winkler, S. (eds.) (2007). On information structure, meaning and 
form: Generalizations across languages. Amsterdam & Philadelphia.
Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. 1986/1995. Relevance: Communication and cognition. 
2nd edn. Oxford & Cambridge (MA): Blackwell.

-------------------------Message 2 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sat, 26 May 2007 13:14:57
From: Emily Bender < ebender at u.washington.edu >
Subject: Grammar Engineering across Frameworks 2007  

Full Title: Grammar Engineering across Frameworks 2007 
Short Title: GEAF07 

Date: 13-Jul-2007 - 15-Jul-2007
Location: Stanford, CA, USA 
Contact Person: Emily M. Bender
Meeting Email: geaf-organizers at u.washington.edu
Web Site: http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~thking/GEAF07.html 

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 01-Jun-2007 

Meeting Description

This workshop aims to bring together grammar engineers from different 
frameworks to compare research and methodologies, particularly around the 
themes of evaluation, modularity, maintainability, relevance to theoretical and 
computational linguistics, and evaluation for internal purposes. 

Call for ''Demos''
Grammar Engineering across Frameworks  
July 13-15, 2007
Stanford, California, USA
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~thking/GEAF07.html

This workshop is part of the 2007 LSA Summer Institute.

Recent years have seen the development of techniques and resources to
support robust, deep grammatical analysis of natural language in real-world 
domains and applications. The demands of these types of tasks have resulted in 
significant advances in areas such as parser efficiency, hybrid statistical/symbolic 
approaches to disambiguation, and the acquisition of large-scale lexicons. The 
effective development, maintenance and enhancement of grammars is a central 
issue in such efforts, and the size and complexity of realistic grammars forces 
these processes to be tackled in ways that have much in common with software 
engineering.  This workshop aims to bring together grammar engineers from 
different frameworks to compare their research and methodologies.

Demo Session

Please submit your demo directly to:
http://www.easychair.org/GEAF2007
with a paragraph description of your demo.  You do not need to turn in a
full paper version, just a short paragraph abstract (note that EasyChair
requires the short abstract as a pdf or txt file in addition to just pasting it in the 
box).  Be sure to choose the ''Demo only'' option for type of submission.

You do not have to have a paper in the workshop in order to give a demo.

Questions: geaf-organizers at u dot washington dot edu

Demo session requests due: June 1, 2007
Workshop: 13-15 July, 2007

Organizing Committee: 
Emily M. Bender, 
University of Washington
Tracy Holloway King, PARC

-----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-18-1605	