36.1646, Calls: 56th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistics Society (USA)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-36-1646. Wed May 28 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.1646, Calls: 56th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistics Society (USA)

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Date: 21-May-2025
From: Gary Thoms [gary.thoms at nyu.edu]
Subject: 56th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistics Society


Full Title: 56th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistics Society
Short Title: NELS 56

Date: 17-Oct-2025 - 19-Oct-2025
Location: New York, USA
Contact Person: Gary Thoms
Meeting Email: nels56 at nyu.edu
Web Site: https://wp.nyu.edu/artsampscience-nels56/

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics

Call Deadline: 08-Jun-2025

Call for Papers:
We are pleased to announce that the 56th Annual Meeting of the North
East Linguistics Society (NELS 56) will be hosted by New York
University in New York, New York, from October 17 to October 19, 2025.
The invited speakers are:
 - Sam Alxatib (The City University of New York)
 - Tanya Bondarenko (Harvard University)
 - Sharon Rose (UC San Diego)
 - Jim Wood (Yale University)
Please note that the deadline for submissions has been delayed
slightly, and the new final submission date is June 8th 2025.
We invite abstracts for 20-minute talks and posters on any theoretical
or formal aspect of natural language, including but not limited to
phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and their
interfaces. Within the conference, there will be a special session on
the topic 'Idiosyncrasy and grammar', which submitters can elect to
put their abstract forward for upon submitting. See below for more
information on the special session.
Abstract Guidelines:
Abstracts, including references and data, must not exceed two A4 or
letter pages, have 2.54 cm (1 inch) margins on all sides, and be set
in Times New Roman with a font size no smaller than 11pt. Examples,
tables, graphs, etc. must be interspersed into the text of the
abstract, and not collected at the end. The submission must not reveal
the identity of the author(s) in any way. Submissions are limited to
two per author, with at most one paper being single-authored.
Abstracts must be submitted in PDF format through the NELS 56 abstract
submission page on Oxford Abstracts by June 8th, 2025 at 23:59 Eastern
Daylight Time (UTC-4).
Note: NELS 56 will give preference to new work. For this reason,
authors will be asked on the Oxford Abstracts submission page to
indicate if your work is under review for publication or has been
accepted for presentation at another major conference.
Timeline:
Submission deadline: June 8th, 2025 at 23:59 Eastern Daylight Time
(UTC-4)
Notification of decisions: mid July
Conference dates: October 17th-19th, 2025.
Conference venue: New York University, Washington Square campus, New
York City
Meeting email: NELS56 at nyu.edu
--
Special session on "Idiosyncrasy and grammar"
Most of our efforts in linguistic theory are directed towards
understanding the nature of productive linguistic processes, and
idiosyncrasies are often understood as being a matter for the lexicon.
In phonological theory, there is a focus on the characterization of
the "phonology proper", while exceptional forms are taken to be stored
in representations that don't impact upon the phonological grammar of
a given language directly; in semantics, the principle of
compositionality directs our focus towards compositional processes of
maximal generality, with lexical semantic effects being explained in
terms of lexical semantic decomposition in syntax, the theorist's main
job is to understand the workings of fundamental operations such as
Merge and Agree, and exceptional patterns playing a minor role (if
any) in guiding the broader theoretical issues. In these domains, the
focus is typically on the 'core', with less attention to the
'periphery'.
Things are a bit different in the domain of morphological theory,
where the focus is on listemes and their relationship to other
modules; in this area, determining the nature of idiosyncrasies is a
core research objective, with major consequences for theory comparison
at the framework level. Consider the case of suppletive allomorphy,
which is where we see both regular and idiosyncratic forms for what
seems to be one and the same syntactic element: the past 15 years has
seen a surge in work on the characterization of suppletion, in
particular in the wake of Bobaljik's (2012) groundbreaking work on
comparatives and superlatives, and advances in theories of morphology
have been driven by this work as the structural conditions on
allomorph selection have been refined on the basis of a broadening
understanding of the empirical patterns into other domains (Embick
2010; Merchant 2015; Smith et al. 2019; Paparounas 2024; Bešlin 2025;
Angelopoulos & Spyropoulos to appear). Relevant for our understanding
of these phenomena is the delimitation of different classes of
allomorphy, as in some instances we might find that suppletion
misnames cases where there is syntactic non-identity (see e.g. Kayne
2018 on 'se'-based possessive clitics in Romance), and in others there
may be more of a role for phonology in determining the range of
possible forms than we had realized at first (e.g. Scheer 2016, Newell
2023).
In a similar vein, another branch of research in the Distributed
Morphology framework has sought to capture patterns of syncretism,
where we see regularity of form but a range of distinct meanings, in
terms of allosemy, whereby there is 'late insertion at LF' of
context-specific denotations (Wood 2012, 2013, 2016, 2022; Marantz
2013; Myler 2016; Wood & Marantz 2017; Kastner 2020). These issues
have been given a particularly sharp treatment in Wood's (2023) book
on Icelandic nominalizations, in which Wood breathes new life into old
questions from Chomsky (1970) about how lexical idiosyncrasies might
shape our view of the architecture of the grammar.  The allosemy
outlook is a natural extension of the treatment of phrasal idioms such
as 'kick the bucket', and so it is fitting to consider the
consequences for this work of recent developments in the study of
idioms. Bruening (2010) proposes a theory of idiom formation based on
selectional contiguity, and pursuing this work has reinvigorated old
debates on the status of functional projections with respect to
selection (see e.g. Bruening et al. 2018). Bruening's work builds on
work on ditransitives by Harley (1995, 2002) and Richards (2001), in
which recurrence of idiomatic meaning with distinct predicates has
been used to argue for lexical decomposition, while the recent
response to Bruening's work in Larson (2017) seeks to reassess the
distinction between idioms and collocations, paying special attention
to the partial compositionality of some idiomatic expressions. Partial
compositionality has also been taken to have some role to play in
determining the extent to which a given passive can participate in
passivization and relativization (Nunberg et al. 1994, cf. Lebeaux
2009, Folli & Harley 2007, McGinnis 2002), although more recent work
that has diversified the discussion with data from beyond English
(Wierzba et al. 2023) indicates that the picture may be more
complicated than that.
Our understanding of the division between the 'core' and the
'periphery' has also been reconfigured by Yang's (2016) work on
productivity, in which Yang proposes a calculus, the Tolerance
Principle, for determining whether or not a potential rule of their
grammar is to become part of the learner's productive grammar. Yang's
work puts a great deal of stock in evidence from acquisition for what
does and does not constitute a truly productive rule, with
overregularization ('gived', 'mouses') as the signature of the
acquisition of a productive rule; on this account, and the scarcity of
'overirregularization' (overgeneralization from irregular forms, e.g.
'brung') in child data tells us that minority rules that the analyst
may posit may not, in fact, be true rules of the grammar, with
substantial implications for how we assess the boundary between
regular rules and `lexicalized' exceptions. The Tolerance Principle
has been applied to a number of domains with some success (Belth et
al. 2021; Kodner 2020, 2022; Belth to appear; Thoms et al. 2025), but
there is a tension between this work and other results in work which
suggest that sublexical generalizations may explain patterns in the
phonological selectiveness of certain affixation processes (Gouskova
et al. 2015, Gouskova 2025). These competing theories differ
fundamentally in how they treat irregularity in morphophonology, and
it remains to be seen what empirical phenomena in other domains might
be brought to bear on the matter.
The purpose of this special session at NELS 56 is to bring researchers
together to discuss these issues and make progress on the broader
theoretical issues that they impact upon. Potential topics of
discussion include but are not limited to:
 - the structural conditioning of suppletive allomorphy
 - the status of allosemy and structurally-conditioned idiosyncratic
meanings more broadly
 - the syntax of idioms and collocations and the line between them
 - productivity, minority rules and idiosyncratic forms
 - lexical specificity effects in syntax and how to model them
 - the syntactic and semantic properties of roots
 - the border between compositional and idiosyncratic components of
lexical meaning
 - overirregularization and sublexical generalization
 - idiosyncrasy as a diagnostic for distinct classes (e.g. clitic vs
affix)
 - psycholinguistic properties of regular vs irregular processes
We welcome work from a range of different research traditions,
including psycholinguistics, computational linguistics and
acquisition.
References:
Angelopoulos, Nikos,  Vassilios Spyropoulos. to appear. The Ups and
Downs of Pruning: Reply to Paparounas (2024). Linguistic Inquiry.
Belth, Caleb. to appear.  Learning-Based Account of Phonological
Tiers. Linguistic Inquiry.
Belth, Caleb, Sarah Payne, Deniz Beser, Jordan Kodner, & Charles Yang.
2021. The Greedy and Recursive Search for Morphological Productivity.
In Proceedings of the 43th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science
Society (CogSci). 43: 2869-2875.
Bešlin, Maša. 2025. Lexical categories, (re)categorization, and
locality in morphosyntax. PhD, University of Maryland.
Bobaljik, Jonathan David. 2012. Universals in comparative morphology:
suppletion, superlatives and the structure of words. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Bruening, Benjamin. 2010. Ditransitive asymmetries and a theory of
idiom formation. Linguistic Inquiry 41, 519-562.
Bruening, Benjamin, Xuyen Dinh, Lan Kim. 2018. Selection, idioms, and
the structure of nominal phrases with and without classifiers. Glossa
3(1): 1-46.
Chomsky, Noam. 1970. Remarks on nominalization. In Studies on
semantics in generative grammar, 11–61. The Hague: Mouton.
Embick, David. 2010. Localism versus Globalism in Morphology and
Phonology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Folli, Raffaella, Heidi Harley. 2007. Causation, obligation, and
argument structure: On the nature of little v. Linguistic Inquiry 38:
197-238.
Gouskova, Maria. 2025. Phonological selection in small sublexicons.
Proceedings of Annual Meeting on Phonology 2023-2024. Edited by Gerard
Avelino, Merlin Balihaxi, Quartz Colvin, Vincent Czarnecki, Hyunjung
Joo, Chenli Wang, Utku Zorbarlar, Adam Jardine, Adam McCollum.
Gouskova, Maria, Luiza Newlin-Łukowicz, and Sofya Kasyanenko. 2015.
Selectional restrictions as phonotactics over sublexicons. Lingua 167,
pp. 41-81.
Harley, Heidi. 1995. Subjects, Events and Licensing. PhD, MIT.
Harley, Heidi. 2002. Possession and the double object construction.
Linguistic Variation Yearbook 2: 29--68.
Kastner, Itamar. 2020. Voice at the Interfaces: The syntax, semantics
and morphology of the Hebrew verb. Berlin: Language Science Press.
Kodner, Jordan. 2020. Language Acquisition in the Past. PhD thesis,
University of Pennsylvania.
Kodner, Jordan. 2022. Language Acquisition Guiding Theory and
Diachrony: A Case Study from Latin Morphology. Natural Language and
Linguistic Theory, 41:733–792.
Larson, Richard K. 2017. On ``dative idioms'' in English. Linguistic
Inquiry 48: 389-426.
Lebeaux, David. 2009. Where does the binding theory apply? Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Marantz, Alec. 2013. Locality domains for contextual allomorphy across
the interfaces. In Ora Matushansky
& Alec Marantz (eds.), Distributed Morphology Today: Morphemes for
Morris Halle, 95–115. MIT Press.
McGinnis, Martha. 2002. On the systematic aspect of idioms. Linguistic
Inquiry 33: 665-672.
Merchant, Jason 2015. How much context is enough? Two cases of
span-conditioned allomorphy. Linguistic Inquiry 46: 273-303.
Myler, Neil. 2016. Building and interpreting possessive sentences.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Newell, Heather. 2023. Tamil pronominal alternations are phonology not
allomorphy. In Shen, Zheng & Laszakovits, Sabine (eds.). The size of
things II: Movement, features, and interpretation. (Open Generative
Syntax 13). Berlin: Language Science Press.
Nunberg, Geoffrey, Ivan Sag, & Thomas Wasow. (1994). Idioms. Language
70: 491-538.
Paparounas, Lefteris. 2024. Visibility and Intervention in Allomorphy:
Lessons from Modern Greek. Linguistic Inquiry 55: 537–577.
Richards, Norvin. 2001. An idiomatic argument for lexical
decomposition. Linguistic Inquiry 32:183–192.
Scheer, Tobias 2016. Melody-free syntax and phonologically conditioned
allomorphy. Morphology 26: 341-378.
Smith, Peter, Beata Moskal, Ting Xu, Jungmin Kang, and Jonathan David
Bobaljik. 2019. Case and Number Suppletion in Pronouns. Natural
Language and Linguistic Theory, 37: 1029-1101.
Thoms, Gary, David Adger, Caroline Heycock, E Jamieson, Jennifer
Smith. 2025. Explaining syntactic microvariation using the Tolerance
Principle: plugging the amn't gap. Journal of Linguistics 61: 369-396.
Wierzba, Marta., J.M.M Brown, J. & Gisbert Fanselow. 2023. Sources of
variability in the syntactic flexibility of idioms. Glossa: 8(1): 1-41
Wood, Jim. 2012. Icelandic Morphosyntax and Argument Structure. PhD,
NYU.
Wood, Jim. 2013. The unintentional causer in Icelandic. In Yelena
Fainleib, Nicholas LaCara & Yangsook Park (eds.), Proceedings of the
Forty-First Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society, vol.
II, 273–286. Amherst, MA: GLSA Publications.
Wood, Jim. 2016. How roots do and don’t constrain the interpretation
of Voice. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 96. 1–25.
Wood, Jim. 2023. Icelandic nominalizations and allosemy. Oxford: OUP.
Wood, Jim and Alec Marantz. 2017. The interpretation of external
arguments. In Roberta D’Alessandro, Irene Franco and Ángel J. Gallego
[eds.] The Verbal Domain, 255–278. Oxford University Press.
Yang, Charles. 2016. The price of linguistic productivity. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.



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